Crossroads

EASTER

Russ awoke in a strange house. Wind was banging on the windows, repulverizing the snow on the branches outside them, and Marion’s side of their bed had not been slept in. Frightened that she hadn’t softened toward him, frightened by the permission she’d given him, frightened also by the problem of Perry’s drug use, he could feel how very reliant he’d become on her support. Turning instead to God, he prayed in bed until he was able to put on a robe and venture into the hallway. Behind closed doors, his three younger children were still asleep. The door and the curtains of Clem’s room were open wide, his absence stark in the morning light. Downstairs, in the kitchen, a pot of coffee was on the stove. He took a mug of it up to his office, and there he found Marion. She was kneeling amid gifts and ribbons and didn’t even glance at him. The sight of her, in the same dress she’d worn the night before, recalled the shock of desiring her, the shame of being rejected. From the doorway, without preamble, he told her that Perry had sold or given marijuana to Larry Cottrell.

“It’s interesting,” she said, “that that’s the first thing you have to say to me today.”

“I meant to bring it up last night. We need to deal with this immediately.”

“I’ve already dealt with it. He told me he’d sold pot.”

“He what? When?”

She calmly ran scissors through a sheet of wrapping paper. Whatever Russ might do or say, she seemed to be a step ahead of him.

“Last night,” she said. “He’s been struggling, and I think the fact that he was open with me—he’s doing better now. As far as I’m concerned, it’s ancient history.”

“He broke the law. He needs to understand that there are consequences.”

“You want to punish him.”

“Yes.”

“I think that’s a mistake.”

“I don’t care what you think. We will present a united front.”

“A united front? Is that a joke?”

Her coolness was worse than coldness. He had an urge to break into it, grab hold of her, impose his will. Their fight the night before had tapped into an unguessed reservoir of rage.

She folded the wrapping paper around a shirt box. “Was there anything else, dear?”

Hatred silenced him. Returning to the second floor, he heard Perry’s and Judson’s voices behind their door. It was only seven thirty, strangely early for Perry to be awake. Russ was disturbed to think that his nine-year-old son, with whom he had semiformal but cordial relations, as if they were longtime next-door neighbors, had been sharing a room with a trafficker in drugs. It didn’t reflect well on the nine-year-old’s father. But when, an hour later, while channeling his rage into shoveling the driveway, he saw Perry and Judson heading out with their sleds, Perry was in such boyishly eager spirits that Russ didn’t have the heart to confront him. It was Christmas Eve, after all.

That night, at dinner—by tradition, spaghetti and meatballs—Perry was in charming form, and his manner with Becky had changed. Gone was his condescension, gone her defensiveness. Marion wouldn’t look at Russ, and all she ate was salad and a few strands of spaghetti. When she teased Becky about Tanner Evans, it fell to Judson to explain to Russ that Becky had a boyfriend, and Russ didn’t know which was more incriminating, that he was the last to learn this news or that he didn’t much care. He’d been living in a world consisting of Frances, God, Rick Ambrose, and the negative blot of Marion. Of his children, the only one he felt at all connected to was Clem, and it grieved him that Clem was with his girlfriend for the holiday; it deprived him of a chance to atone for embarrassing him. For relief from his isolation, he let his thoughts turn to Frances. He imagined smoking marijuana with her, imagined its lowering of their inhibitions. Then he wondered what it said about God’s intentions that the marijuana in question had passed through Perry’s hands.

Rising abruptly from the table, he said he’d forgotten an important call to a parishioner. As he left the room, Marion’s amused voice followed him. “Tell her I said Merry Christmas.”

The third floor smelled of her disturbance. On the sill of the storage-room window, an ashtray brimmed with cigarette ends, and this was fine with him. It somehow ratified the permission she’d given him. Using the permission, he picked up the phone in his office.

Frances, answering, brushed aside his apology for calling on a holiday—he was her pastor! He’d intended to let her wonder if he’d made peace with Ambrose and was going to Arizona, but he couldn’t help telling her immediately.

“Hooray, hooray,” she said. “I knew I was right.”

“You were right about Perry, too. He did sell marijuana.”

“Of course I was right. Aren’t I always?”

“Well, so, I could use your advice there. Are you, ah, private?”

“Sort of. My folks are here for dinner.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to interrupt.”

“I was just clearing the table. Tell me how I can help.”

From two floors below came a burst of family laughter in which Perry’s arpeggio of hilarity was uppermost. Russ wondered if, a year from now, he wouldn’t have to call Frances; if he might be sitting down to dinner with her and her folks.

“Well, apparently,” he said, “Perry’s cleaned up his act. At this point, I could just let it drop, but I feel some sort of punishment is in order.”

“You’re asking the wrong gal. You may remember what’s in my sock drawer.”

“I do. And the fact—well, the experiment we talked about. It complicates things for me. I can’t punish Perry and then—you know. It would be hypocritical.”

“That’s an easy one. Just don’t do the second thing.”

“But I want to. I want to do it with you.”

“Okay, wow. I should probably get off the phone.”

“Just quickly tell me if you’re still interested in doing this.”

“Definitely getting off the phone.”

“Frances—”

“I’m not saying no. I’m saying I need to think about it.”

“You were the one who suggested it!”

“Mm, not quite. The just-you-and-me part was your idea.”

He couldn’t have asked for a clearer indication that his desires were known to her. To be engaged in sexual implication, in his church-provided house, on a family holiday, was shameful and thrilling.

“Anyway,” she said, “Merry Christmas. I’ll see you in church on Sunday.”

“You’re not coming to the midnight service?”

“No. But your eagerness is noted, Reverend Hildebrandt.”

In the manner of the early Christians, who’d believed that the Messiah who’d walked the earth within living memory would soon return—that the Day of Judgment was just around the corner—Russ imagined that his situation with Frances, already so fraught with implication, so poised to blossom into rapture, would resolve itself in a matter of days. While he awaited her judgment, which seemed imminent, he postponed a confrontation with his son, and by the time he understood how long he might have to wait, Perry’s transgressions had become, as Marion had said, ancient history. Perry really did seem to be doing better. No longer an evasive, late-sleeping boy, he seemed slimmer and perhaps a little taller, and he was always in good spirits. Because Marion had taken to sleeping on the third floor and keeping odd hours, it sometimes happened that Perry, who now rose even earlier than Russ, made breakfast for him and Judson.

Beginning with old Mrs. O’Dwyer, who’d succumbed to pneumonia, the new year brought a string of funerals for which Russ did all the counseling and officiating, while the Haefles vacationed in Florida. He still had the extra duties Dwight had given him when he left Crossroads, and now that he’d been reinstated in the group he felt obliged to attend Sunday-night meetings. To show Ambrose the sincerity of his repentance, while avoiding the hazard of counseling troubled teenagers, he volunteered to handle all the logistics for the Arizona trip—hiring the buses, reviewing the church’s liability policy, procuring project supplies, coordinating with the Navajos.

Mired in work, he watched Marion race ahead of him. She was visibly losing weight, abetted by smoking and a regimen of punishing walks. He was included in the dinners she continued to put on the table, but she now sorted through the laundry hamper and set aside his clothes while she washed everyone else’s. He attended church functions without her, poured hours he couldn’t spare into sermons that refused to come into focus without her help, while she went out to the library, to lectures at the Ethical Culture Society, and to the decaying clapboard theater that was home to the New Prospect Players. Her new independence smacked of women’s liberation, which he approved of at the societal level, and he might have approved of it in his wife if he’d been getting anywhere with Frances.

But the day of judgment kept receding. On the Tuesday circle’s first outing to the inner city after Christmas, Frances attached herself so tightly to Kitty Reynolds that he couldn’t get a single private word with her. When he called her house, a few days later, in the guise of routine pastoral concern, she said she was late to class and would stop by his office later in the week. He waited, in vain, for eight days. Feeling unfairly at her mercy, casting about for leverage, he was inspired to invite an unmarried seminarian, Carolyn Polley, to come along on the next Tuesday outing. Carolyn was a friend of Ambrose and an adviser in Crossroads, and Russ hoped that by insisting that she ride with him, by making a fuss of introducing her to Theo Crenshaw, and by keeping her at his side throughout the day, he might provoke some jealousy in Frances. Instead he provoked a statement from Carolyn, in the awkwardly explicit style of Crossroads, that she had a boyfriend in Minneapolis. Frances herself was so chummy with Kitty Reynolds, so intimately murmuring, that Russ, in his jealousy, wondered if her hunger for new experiences might extend as far as lesbianism. Not once did she look at him directly. It was as if none of the tensy-tension between them, none of the innuendo on Christmas Eve, had ever happened.

When the Tuesday circle returned to First Reformed, in the last light of day, he caught up with her before she could escape in her car. He chided her, gently, for not having stopped by his office. “I hope you’re not,” he said, “avoiding me for some reason?”

She edged away from him. She was wearing a puffy parka and a stocking cap, not her fetching hunter’s ensemble. “Actually I am, a little bit.”

“Will you—tell me why?”

“It’s terrible. You’re going to hate me.”

The twilight in January, the way it lingered in the western sky, partook of early spring, but the air was still bitterly dry and tasted of road salt.

“I was feeling bad,” she said, “that I hadn’t listened to your records. I didn’t want to talk to you until I did, and so finally, last week, I had them all spread out in the living room, and then the phone rang, and I had to make dinner, and I forgot about them. When I went to turn a light on, I didn’t see them on the floor.”

She sounded vaguely annoyed, as if it were the records’ fault.

“I already talked to the record store,” she said. “They’re going to try to find replacements. I only stepped on two of them, but apparently one of them is very hard to find.”

Russ’s heart felt stepped on.

“You don’t have to replace them,” he managed to say. “They’re just worldly things.”

“No, I’m absolutely going to.”

“As you wish.”

“See? You do hate me.”

“No, I—just think I might have misread something. I thought that you and I were going to—I thought I could help you on your journey.”

“I know. I was supposed to give you an answer about that.”

“It’s all right. Perry’s doing much better—I’m not going to punish him.”

“But I stepped on your records. The least I can do is give you an answer.”

“As you wish.”

“Except here’s another confession. I already sort of did the experiment, by myself. I can’t say it was life-altering. It was more like an hour-long head cold.”

Russ turned away, to hide his disappointment.

“I want to try again, though,” she said, touching his arm. “I’ve—there’s been a lot going on with me. But let’s you and me find a time. Okay?”

“It sounds like you’re doing fine without me.”

“No, let’s do it. Just the two of us. Unless you want to ask Kitty.”

“I don’t want to ask Kitty.”

“This’ll be fun,” Frances said.

Her enthusiasm sounded effortful, and when he called her that night, calendar in hand, their search for a mutually workable date had a flavor of dreary obligation. The experiment could only be done on a weekday, while her kids were at school, and his regular church duties fell precisely on the days that Frances had open. With some foreboding, he agreed to meet her on Ash Wednesday.

There was a foretaste of ash in his days of waiting for their date. The hope that Clem would reconsider his decision to quit school had already been dashed on Christmas Day, when he called to report that he hadn’t gone to his girlfriend in Urbana. He was alone in New Orleans—would rather spend Christmas in a squalid hotel room than with his family. Russ knew that the fault was his, and he wanted to write to Clem, to apologize and try to set things right, but he didn’t have a mailing address. In January, Clem called home periodically to ask Marion if a letter from the draft board had arrived. In February came the news that he’d spoken to the board and learned that it didn’t intend to call him up. The news ought to have been a pure relief for Russ, as it was for Marion, but he was hurt that he had to hear the news from Becky, hurt that Clem still hadn’t given them his address, hurt that he had no plans to come home. According to Becky, he was working at a Kentucky Fried Chicken.

One of the few bright spots in Russ’s life—that Becky, against all expectations, had found her way to Christian faith and shared her inheritance with her brothers—was dimmed when she stopped attending services at First Reformed. She’d already spurned his invitation to join his confirmation class, and it now transpired that she and Tanner Evans were exploring other churches in New Prospect. When Russ asked why, she said she was looking for something more inspiring than Dwight Haefle’s sermons. “Does he even believe in God?” she said. “It’s like listening to Rod McKuen.” Russ, who had his own doubts about Dwight’s faith, replied that he, Russ, did believe in God. “Then maybe,” Becky said, “you should talk more about your relationship with Him and less about the evening news.” Her point was debatable, but he sensed that theology was just a pretext anyway; that her rejection of him was deeper and more personal; that Clem had done a thorough job of turning her against him. And perhaps rightly so. The bathroom sink into which he now regularly spent his seed, picturing Frances Cottrell and blocking from his mind all thought of God, was three steps from his daughter’s bedroom door.

Even Arizona had become a clouded prospect. Enough kids had signed up for the spring trip to fill three buses, and his plan was to leave two of them at the base of the Black Mesa while he led a third group up to the school at Kitsillie. The Black Mesa was in the heart of Diné Bikéyah. Nowhere more than up in its thin air, in the mind- and landscape-bending midday sun, beneath night skies pressing down with the weight of a million stars, had he felt more connected to the Navajo spirit world. Kitsillie’s primitive conditions would also be an opportunity to show Frances how capable he was of handling them, and they would test her appetite for new experiences. If, unlike Marion, she turned out to have a taste for roughing it, the possibilities for further joint adventures would be limitless. But when, after much trying, he reached Keith Durochie on the telephone, Keith bluntly told him, “Don’t go there.”

“To Kitsillie?”

“Don’t go there. The energy is bad. You won’t be welcome.”

“That’s nothing new,” Russ said lightly. “I wasn’t so welcome in the forties, either. You remember how you wouldn’t even shake my hand?”

He expected Keith to laugh at the memory, as he had in the past, but Keith didn’t.

“You’ll be safer in Many Farms,” he said. “We have plenty of work here. The people on the mesa are unhappy with the bilagáana.”

“Well, and I know a thing or two about building bridges. Why don’t we see how things look when I get there.”

Keith, after a silence, said, “You and I are old, Russ. Things aren’t the same.”

“I’m not so old, and neither are you.”

“No, I’m old. I saw my death the other day. It was on the ridge behind my house—not far.”

“I don’t know about that,” Russ said, “but I’m happy to think I’ll be seeing you again.”

On the morning of Ash Wednesday, he left his car in the First Reformed parking lot, so as not to let it be seen too suspiciously long at Frances’s, and walked uphill on sidewalks wet with the melting of dismal, clumpy snowflakes. The hour, nine o’clock, felt more suitable for a doctor’s appointment. Frances’s house was freshly painted and rather stately, a reminder of how much money she’d received from General Dynamics, and he rang her doorbell with a foreboding which he could only pray that marijuana would dispel.

“So much for my idea,” she said, leading him into her kitchen, “that you wouldn’t show up.”

“Do you not want me here?”

“I just hope we’re not making a big mistake.”

She was wearing a wide-necked brown sweaterdress and thick gray socks. Seeing her as she was at home, not in one of her smart Sunday outfits, not in her Tuesday-circle tomboy attire, he had an unsettling strong hit of her reality—her independence as a woman, her thinking of thoughts and making of choices wholly unrelated to him. To glimpse how it must feel to be her, inhabiting her own life, round the clock, was exciting but also daunting. On the counter by the kitchen stove, she’d already set out an ashtray and a crudely fashioned marijuana cigarette.

“Shall we get right to it,” she said, “or do we need to discuss it to death first?”

“No. Just assure me you’re really okay with doing this.”

“I’ve already done it—sort of. I don’t think I had enough.”

She reached and turned on the stove fan, and he wondered if there was underwear beneath her sweaterdress. The dress had slipped down her shoulder without exposing a bra strap. The skin of her upper back, which he’d never seen before, was smooth and lightly freckled. It, too, was real, and it gave him a pang of nostalgia for the safety of his fantasies. He’d been managing all right with fantasies; he could probably keep managing indefinitely. And yet to shy from the reality of Frances would confirm Marion’s belittling assessment of him. She’d given him permission because she didn’t believe he was man enough to use it.

“Let’s see what happens,” he said.

They hunched forward, side by side, under the exhaust fan. The marijuana smoke was scalding, and he might have stopped at one lungful if Frances hadn’t insisted that one wasn’t enough. She took sip after sip of smoke, holding the little cigarette like a dart, and he followed her lead. They didn’t stop until the remainder was too small to be handed back and forth. She went to the sink, dropped the “roach” in the garbage disposal, and opened a window. The snowflakes outside struck Russ as peculiar, artificial, as though strewn by someone standing on the roof. Frances stretched her arms above her head, raising the hem of her dress and with it, again, the question of underwear.

“Wow,” she said, splaying her raised hands. “This is much better. I wonder if you have to do it twice before you get the full effect.”

Though this was Russ’s first time, he was definitely getting an effect. The realization had hit him, like an anvil, that February was flu season—one of her kids could easily come home sick and discover him with their mother. The possibility seemed far from minimal, indeed quite strong, and he was appalled that he hadn’t considered it until now. The hour also suddenly felt not at all like morning. It felt closer to the hour when school let out—he could almost hear the final bell, the tumult of liberated kids, Frances’s among them. In the glare of the kitchen lights, he further realized, he was highly visible to her next-door neighbors. Looking around for a switch, he noticed that she’d left the room.

From the front of the house, at a sickeningly high volume, easily loud enough to attract the attention of neighbors, if not the police, came the sound of Robert Johnson singing “Cross Road Blues.” Russ discovered that he’d turned out most of the kitchen lights, but the one overhead was still burning. In the midst of searching for the switch, he understood that he could simply leave the kitchen.

The living room was blessedly dusky. Frances had thrown herself onto a sofa and bunched up her dress in the process. Russ glimpsed a sliver of white panty and searingly wished he hadn’t. His interest in the question of underwear was obscene. The loudness of Robert Johnson was an emergency.

“What do you think?” she called to him happily. “Are you feeling anything?”

“I’m thinking,” he said, but this wasn’t true, because, whatever he’d been thinking, he’d now forgotten it. Then, surprisingly, he remembered. “I’m thinking we should turn the music down.”

Even as he said it, he knew it was hideously square. He braced himself for shaming.

“You have to tell me everything you’re feeling,” she said. “That was the agreement. Actually, there was no agreement, but what’s the point of an experiment if we don’t compare results?”

He went to the stereo console and turned down the volume—too far. He therefore raised it again—too far. He lowered it again—too far.

“Come sit with me,” Frances called from the sofa. “I’m so aware of my skin—you know what I mean? It’s like the Beatles, I want to hold your hand. I’m just so—it’s like I’m here but my thoughts are in every corner of the room. Like I’m blowing up a gigantic balloon and the air is my thoughts. You know what I mean?”

I went down to the cross road, babe, I looked both east and west

Lord, I didn’t have no sweet woman, babe, in my distress

Standing at the console, Russ was plunged into the hissing, low-fidelity world from which Robert Johnson was singing. He’d never felt more pierced by the beauty of the blues, the painful sublimity of Johnson’s voice, but also never more damned by it. Wherever Johnson was singing from, Russ could never hope to get there. He was an outsider, a latter-day parasite—a fraud. It came to him that all white people were frauds, a race of parasitic wraith-people, and none more so than he. To have loaned Frances his records, imagining that some particle of authenticity might adhere to him and redeem him, was the pinnacle of fraudulence.

“Oh Reverend Hildebrandt,” she called in a singsong voice. “A penny for your thoughts.”

The record label rotating below him was not Vocalion. The record was an LP, not a 78. Dimly, through his confusion, came the fear that she’d replaced his valuable antique with a cheap modern compilation, but instead of being angered he experienced a kind of menace. The revolving vinyl was like a vortex, a dark drain down which he was being sucked toward darker death. There had to be a special place in hell for him. If indeed hell, its sulfurous fires, existed. If hell weren’t exactly where he was standing, in his detestable fraudulence, right this minute. He felt his back go warm with a body’s proximity.

“You seem,” Frances said from close behind him, “more interested in the music than in me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. You can feel anything you want. I just want to hear about it.”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, lacerated by her reproach, convinced of its justice.

“But maybe we don’t need the music.”

The haste with which he took her suggestion and raised the tone arm screamed of a too-eager accession to another person’s wishes, a lack of authentic wishes of his own. As the record slowed to a halt, Frances put her arms around him from behind. She rested her head between his shoulder blades.

“This is okay, right?” she said. “A friendly hug?”

Her warmth entered his body and funneled straight into his loins.

“It’s so much better this time. I wonder if it’s a social thing, like you need to be with someone else to get the full experience. What do you think?”

He thought his head might burst with terror. He heard himself issue a chuckle, prefatory to some kind of speech act. The chuckle was reekingly phony, a creaking contraption of sinew and muscle, involuntarily activated by a craven wish to please and to fit in—to pass as an authentic person. It seemed to him that every word he’d ever uttered had been loathsome, slimy with self-interested calculation, his fatuousness audible to everyone and universally deplored. All his life, people had concealed their true opinion of him—only Clem had been honest. Into his chest, like a giant air bubble, unreleasable through lungs or stomach, came the agony of having hurt his son. He leaned forward and opened his mouth, trying somehow to release the bubble. He perceived his resemblance to the parishioners whose final moment he’d witnessed, his jaw lowered with agonal breathing, his facial skin stretched over an emerging death’s-head. It wasn’t clear how he could survive another moment of the agony.

When Frances withdrew from him, he felt no relief, only reproach. She was having a joyful experience and he an abominable one. This fact, the humiliation of it, seemed to brighten the living room in a disagreeable way.

“There’s something weird about the light,” she said. “It seems different from one moment to the next—I wonder if it’s always doing that. Maybe the pot makes my eyes more sensitive?”

Her friendly tone compounded his torture. That she wasn’t recoiling from his ugliness and failure seemed impossibly merciful. He alone, of all the people in the world, was phony, he alone a wraith-person.

“It does seem brighter,” he found himself saying, only to be stricken by the revolting wetness of his mouth’s creation of the words.

“Are you all right?” Frances said. “I read that pot makes some people paranoid.”

Before he could stop himself, he admitted that he was feeling paranoid. Instantly ashamed, he added, with croaking falsity, “Just a little—not a lot.”

“Come sit with me—I’ll hold your hand. Maybe you just need to feel safe.”

Going anywhere near her was unthinkable. His dread of discovery by her children had struck him with renewed force, and the kitchen! Even with the fan on, the kitchen surely stank of marijuana. It was imperative to get away before he was discovered. In his mind, he formed the words I’m sorry, trying to gauge what more they might reveal about his native excrescence. Whether he actually uttered them, as he left the room and snatched his coat from the newel post, he never knew.

Walking back to the church, unable to find a facial expression that didn’t broadcast culpability, he might have been a spider crawling across a white wall. It was a miracle that no one stared at him. When he reached his car, he locked himself inside it and lay down on the front seat, out of sight. Eventually he noticed that he was no longer psychotic, but the emotional truth of his paranoia persisted. When he returned to the parsonage, intending to hide in his office and pray, he was moved to stop first in the storage room and empty Marion’s ashtray into his hands. He smeared the ashes into his face, opened his mouth to them.

The season of Lent had begun, and it wasn’t all bad. Shame and self-abasement were still his portals to God’s mercy. The old paradox—that weakness, honestly owned, made a man stronger in his faith—still obtained. Accepting his failure with Frances, he asked Kitty Reynolds to lead the next Tuesday circle without him. At home, he humbled himself with Marion, told her she looked nice, took an interest. When she said, with cool amusement, “I gather you’ve had a setback with your little friend,” he turned the other cheek. He said, “Go ahead and mock me. I deserve it.” The days were getting longer, and when he sat in his twilit study and labored to express a sermon-worthy thought, he could hear her clearing her throat in the adjacent room, applying her language skills to the at-home proofreading work she was doing to pay for new clothes, a better hairdresser. Now that she was looking trimmer, more like the intense young woman he’d fallen for, he wondered if there might be hope for their marriage after all—if they might yet find their way to a new arrangement.

But she still slept on the third floor and made him do his own laundry, and despite his renewed engagement with God he couldn’t rid his mind of Frances. As he wore out the shame of his behavior in her living room, through incessant revisiting of it, he remembered more clearly her own behavior: that she’d asked him, more than once, to hold her hand; that she’d put her arms around him from behind, in a supposedly friendly hug (weren’t friendly hugs frontal?); and that, moreover, she’d dressed for their date in a garment begging to be raised above her hips. With terrible hindsight, he saw that she’d offered him the very chance he’d dreamed of. And even if he’d had her only once, even if he was only a passing itch she’d felt like scratching, while high on drugs, it would have meant the world to him.

He was mourning his lost chance when God’s providence intervened. Although he sensed its awkwardness for Becky and Perry, he’d attended every Crossroads meeting in the new year. He was technically an adviser, but he’d embraced his inferiority to Rick Ambrose and comported himself like a newcomer, there to participate in exercises and explore his emotions, not to enable young people’s growth in Christ. On the last Sunday night in February, after Ambrose had parted the crowd in the function hall, as if it were the Red Sea, and instructed one half of it to write their names on slips of paper from which the other half would draw partners, Russ unfolded the slip he’d drawn and saw whom God had given him. The name on the slip was Larry Cottrell.

“The instruction here is simple,” Ambrose told the group. “Each of us tells our partner a thing that’s really troubling us—at school, at home, in a relationship. The idea is to be honest, and for our partner to think honestly about how to be helpful. Remember that sometimes the most helpful thing is just to be present and listen without judging.”

Russ had thus far avoided Larry Cottrell, to the point of never looking at him, and Larry seemed neither pleased nor displeased to be his partner—it was just another exercise. As the other dyads dispersed around the church, Russ led him upstairs to his office and asked what was troubling him.

Larry touched his nostrils. “So you know,” he said, “my dad was killed two years ago. We had a picture of him, in his air-force uniform, it was in our upstairs hallway, and then last week it wasn’t there anymore. I asked my mom why she took it down, and she told me … She told me she was tired of looking at it.”

The pimpled half-maturity of Larry’s face, the coarsening of his mother’s features by male hormones, corrected Russ’s notion that her looks were boyish. No boy looked like Frances.

“And then,” he said, “this guy she’s been dating, I mean, she’s probably lonely, but she gets all fluttery when she’s going out with him, and it’s like my dad never existed. He was one of the youngest colonels in the history of the air force … he was my dad—and now she doesn’t even want to see a picture of him?”

Russ was alarmed by the ambiguity of has been dating—whether the verb tense encompassed the present or referred to a period now past.

“So,” he said, “your mother has been, or was, at some point…”

“Yeah, I finally met the guy. She made me and Amy go to lunch with him.”

Russ cleared a sudden dryness from his throat. “When was this?”

“Saturday.”

Ten days after the marijuana experiment.

“It was horrible,” Larry said. “I mean, obviously I’m not going to like him, because he’s not my dad, but he’s so full of himself, he’s bragging about doing surgery for sixteen hours, he’s showing off to the waiter, and he talked to Amy like she was three years old. He’s so full of shit, and my mom’s all fluttery and fake with him.”

Russ cleared his throat again. “And you think this might—be a serious relationship? Your mother and the—surgeon? Is that what’s troubling you?”

“I thought he was out of the picture, and now suddenly everything is ‘Philip’ this and ‘Philip’ that.”

“Since—how long?”

“I don’t know. The last few weeks.”

“And—does your mother know how you feel about him?”

“I said I thought he was a pompous jerk.”

“And—how did she react?”

“She got mad. She said I was being selfish and hadn’t given ‘Philip’ a chance. Which, like—I’m selfish? She was supposed to be an adviser on Spring Trip. She acted all hurt that I didn’t want to be in the same group with her, and now she tells me she isn’t sure she even wants to go. ‘Philip’ wants to take her to some bogus medical conference in Acapulco, that same week.”

Russ’s face was ashen; he could feel it.

“Sometimes I’m almost, like, why did it have to be my dad who died? He was always yelling, but at least he paid attention. My mom doesn’t even care. She only cares about herself.”

There was recognizably a truth in this, but it didn’t bother Russ. He’d had enough of being married to a self-hating caretaker.

“Maybe you should tell her,” he said, “that you want her to come on Spring Trip. Tell her how much it would mean to you.”

“I don’t know which would be worse, having to be around her, or her being with that creep. It’s like I hate everyone.”

“Well, it’s good that you’re honest about your feelings. That’s what Crossroads is about. I hope you’ll consider me someone you can open up to.”

For the first time, Larry looked at Russ as if he were more than just a generic dyad partner. “Can I say something weird?”

“Ah?”

“She’s always talking about you. She keeps asking me what I think of you.”

“Yes—well. She and I have the circle together. We’ve gotten to be—friendly.”

“I’m going, Mom, he’s the minister. He’s married.”

“Yes.”

“Sorry—was that weird of me?”

For a moment, Russ considered leveling with Larry, perhaps trying to enlist his aid, but the memory of leveling with Sally Perkins scared him off. The terms of the exercise now obliged him to offer a story of his own, but everything that troubled him pertained somehow to Larry. He obviously couldn’t talk about his marriage, or about Perry’s drug use. Clem’s crazy attempt to join the army was also off-limits, because Larry was proud of his father’s service. On Russ’s desk was a copy of an engineering report on the church sanctuary’s south wall, which was in danger of collapsing. It could be argued that this troubled him.

When their allotted time expired, he sent Larry downstairs and stayed in his office to call Frances; he no longer had anything to lose. As soon as she heard his voice, the line went silent. Sensing that he’d overstepped, he rushed to apologize, but she cut him off. “I’m the one who should apologize.”

“Not at all,” he said. “For whatever reason, I had a bad reaction to the, ah—”

“I know. It was funny how paranoid you got. But it’s not like you could help it, and I totally understand why you ran away. You did the right thing—I was very, very out of line. That’s why I didn’t go to Tuesday circle last week. I was too ashamed of myself.”

“But that’s—why were you ashamed?”

“Um, because I basically tried to jump you? I can blame it on the you-know-what, but it was still completely inappropriate. I’m sorry I put you in that position. I’m in a much clearer place now. I did an honest reckoning, and, well, you don’t have to worry about me. If you can manage to forgive me, I promise it will never happen again.”

Whether the good news here outweighed the bad was hard to judge. His chance with her had been even better than he’d surmised, his blowing of it even more conclusive than he’d feared.

“I hope we can still be friends,” Frances said.

A week later, she called to invite him to an evening with Buckminster Fuller at the Illinois Institute of Technology. No sooner had he accepted, in his capacity as a friend, than she added that this was the kind of evening that Philip hated. “Did I mention I’m seeing him again? I’m trying to be a good girl, but it’s no fun being in an audience with him. He gets all fidgety, like he can’t stand it that people are paying attention to someone else.” Russ was discouraged that she imagined he cared to hear about Philip, encouraged that she complained about him. Reminding himself that she’d been attracted to him enough to try to “jump” him, despite his being married, he dressed for their date in his most flattering shirt and applied, for the first time, some of the cologne that Becky had given him for Christmas, only to find, when Frances picked him up at the parsonage, that Kitty Reynolds was in her car. Frances hadn’t mentioned that Kitty was coming, and Russ, being merely her friend, had no basis for objecting. Nor did he have any great interest in Buckminster Fuller, though he was careful not to fidget in his seat.

A consolation for losing Frances to the surgeon was that she didn’t avoid Russ on their next Tuesday in the city. She now evidently felt safe to ride in his Fury again, to prefer his company to Kitty’s and volunteer to work with him in an old woman’s Morgan Street kitchen, rolling onto its walls a paint color known as Ballerina Pink (wildly overproduced by its maker, now available for pennies) while he painted the edges. It was sad to be considered safe, but he was happy that she still wanted to be with him, happy to see her huddling companionably with Theo Crenshaw, happy to have helped her mend that fence.

The shock was therefore brutal when, on a gray March morning, she came to his church office and announced that she was quitting the Tuesday circle. It might have been the gray light, but she seemed older, more brittle. He invited her to sit down.

“No,” she said. “I wanted to tell you in person, but I can’t stay.”

“Frances. You can’t just drop a bomb like that. Did something happen?”

She looked close to tears. He stood up, closed the door, and managed to seat her in his visitor chair. Her hair, too, seemed older—darker, less silky.

“I’m just not a good enough person,” she said.

“That’s ridiculous. You’re a wonderful person.”

“No. My children don’t respect me, and you—I know you like me, but you shouldn’t. I don’t believe in God—I don’t believe in anything.”

He crouched at her feet. “Will you tell me what happened?”

“There’s no point in explaining—you won’t understand.”

“Try me.”

She shut her eyes. “Philip says I can’t go with you anymore. I know that sounds stupid, and if that’s all it was I wouldn’t—I might still go. But with everything else it’s just easier not to.”

The thought that the surgeon might be jealous of him—had reason to be jealous—only deepened Russ’s sense of defeat.

“He knew,” Frances said, “that I did volunteer work in the city. But when he found out where the church is, he said it was too dangerous. I tried to explain that it’s not so bad, but he wouldn’t listen, and—I hate being submissive. It’s not who I want to be, but in this case it’s just easier, because that really is who I am: I’m the person who does whatever’s easiest.”

“That’s not true at all. Have you talked to Kitty about this?”

“I can’t. Kitty won’t respect me, either. I mean—I know, I know, I know. I’m with another jerk—I know. Larry’s already barely speaking to me. I made him go to lunch with Philip, and Larry could see it—everyone can see it. I’m with a jerk again. A worse jerk, actually. Bobby at least wasn’t a racist.”

“No one should be allowed to tell you what you can and can’t do.”

“I know, and, like I said, if it was just Philip I might stand up to him. But the thing is, inside, I’m just like him. I still think I’m going to get raped or murdered every time I go down there.”

“These are deep patterns,” Russ said. “It takes time to develop new patterns.”

“I know, and I’ve been trying. I apologized to Theo, the way you told me to, and you were right—it made a difference. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Ronnie, how to help him, and so I talked to Theo again. According to him, the problem is that Ronnie’s mother is a heroin addict. I asked if he could get her into a treatment program—I offered to pay for it myself and let him say the money came from his congregation.”

“That is not the action of a person who isn’t good.”

“But he basically said it was impossible. He thinks Clarice would start using drugs again as soon as she gets out. I told Theo there has to be some okay foster family that would take a sweet little boy. I offered to talk to a social worker myself and make sure everything checked out. But Theo said, if I did that, the social worker would never let Clarice near Ronnie again. I said I thought that might be for the best. But Theo said Ronnie’s the only thing keeping Clarice alive, and that a social worker wouldn’t see that, because the state only cares about the boy’s welfare, not the mother’s. I tried to remember what you told me and not argue with him, but I pointed out that he’s okay with a situation no social worker would be okay with. I said that sooner or later something terrible is going to happen. And Theo just shrugs. He says, ‘That’s in God’s hands.’ And that shut me up. I didn’t argue with him.”

“None of this,” Russ said, “makes me think less of you. Quite the opposite.”

Frances didn’t seem to hear him. “I’m not like you,” she said. “I can’t accept that God creates a situation so terrible there’s no getting out of it. To me, it’s like there’s a door, and behind the door is the inner city, and everywhere you turn there’s a situation so terrible that no one can fix it, and I’ve reached the point where I just can’t open the door again. I just want to shut it and forget what’s behind it. When Philip said I couldn’t go with you again, I had this horrid sense of relief.”

“I wish you’d told me sooner,” Russ said. “No situation is so hopeless that nothing can be done. Maybe, next time we’re down there, you and Theo and I can do some brainstorming.”

“No. I’m not going there again—it’s just not for me. I wanted it to be for me. I looked at you and I said to myself, that’s the person I want to be like. It was exciting to be with you, but I think I mistook being with you for being like you. The reality is I’m a crap human being.”

“No, no, no.”

“Apparently I’m turned on by jerks. I’m turned on by money, by trips to Acapulco, nobody judging me, nobody forcing me to open doors I don’t feel like opening. The idea that I could be a different kind of person was just a fantasy.”

“There’s a difference between fantasy and aspiration.”

“You don’t know my fantasies. Actually, you did see one of them—I’m still ashamed of that.”

Russ sensed that she’d come to him wanting to be saved but not knowing how; was edging toward a breakthrough and needed a push. But saved from what? From loss of faith, or from the surgeon?

“What exactly—was it?” he said. “The fantasy.”

She blushed. “I imagined you were somebody who didn’t let being married get in the way of—I imagined you could be a jerk.” She shuddered at herself. “Do you see the kind of person I am? It’s like I needed to drag you down to my level. If you were at my level, I wouldn’t have to keep looking up to you and feeling like I was falling short.”

His dilemma had never been plainer. She liked him for his goodness, it was the best thing he had going for him, and by definition goodness meant not having her.

“I’m not so good,” he said. “I’m like you—I did the easy thing. I married, I had kids, I took a job in the suburbs, and it’s made me nothing but unhappy. My marriage is a disaster. Marion sleeps in a different room—we barely speak—and my children don’t respect me. I’m a failure as a father, worse than a failure as a husband. I’m more of a jerk than you may think.”

Frances shook her head. “That only makes me feel worse.”

“How so?”

She stood up and stepped around him. “I never should have flirted with you.”

“Just give me a chance,” he said, jumping to his feet. “At least come to Arizona. There’s a spirituality in the air, in the people. It changed my life—it could change yours, too.”

“Yeah, that was another mistake. Trying to make you go there with me.”

“Not at all. If it weren’t for you, I might never have patched things up with Rick. You did a great thing for me. You’ve been such a bright star in my life—I don’t know what’s happened to you.”

“Nothing’s happened. It was only dreading this conversation—having to disappoint you. I’ll be fine as soon as I can close the door again.”

By way of illustration, she moved toward the door, and Russ couldn’t stop her. He was utterly impotent. All at once, he was seized by a hatred so intense he could have strangled her. She was insensitive and self-adoring, a careless trampler of records, a casual crusher of hearts.

“That’s bullshit,” he said. “Everything you say is bullshit. You’re only running away because you’re too chicken to face the goodness in your heart, too chicken to take responsibility. I don’t believe that disengaging from the world is going to make you happy. But if that’s the miserable life you want, we don’t need you in the circle. We don’t need you in Arizona. If you don’t have the guts to honor your commitments, I say good riddance.”

His emotion was authentic, but to express it so directly was a Crossroads thing. He sounded like Rick Ambrose in confrontation mode.

“I mean it,” he said. “Get the hell out of here. I don’t want to see you again.”

“I guess I deserve that.”

“Fuck deserving. You’re a mess of phony self-reproach. It makes me sick.”

“Wow. Ouch.”

“Just leave. You really are a disappointment.”

He hardly knew what he was saying, but in sounding like Ambrose he felt some of the power that Ambrose must have felt all the time. As if, however momentarily, the Lord was with him. Frances looked at him with a new kind of interest.

“I like your honesty,” she said.

“I don’t give a damn what you like. Just, on your way out, tell Rick you’re not going to Arizona.”

“Unless I decide to go. Wouldn’t that be a surprise?”

“This isn’t a game. Either you’re going or you’re not.”

“Well, in that case…” She made a little slide-step dance move. “Maybe I will. How about that?”

In his anger, he didn’t care. Her maybes were like needles to his brain. He dropped into his desk chair and turned away from her. “Suit yourself.”

Only after she was gone did he reconnect with his desire. All in all, he thought, their meeting could hardly have gone better. The revelation was how positively she’d responded to his anger, how negatively to his begging. He’d stumbled upon the key to her. If he kept away from her, let her think he’d lost his patience with her, she might yet defy the surgeon and go to Arizona.

But it was a torment not to know what she was thinking. The following Sunday, at the last Crossroads meeting before Spring Trip, he searched the teenaged throng for Larry, intending to ask him what his mother’s plans were. When he discovered that Larry, unaccountably, had skipped the meeting, his torment became acute. The next morning, first thing, he went to Ambrose’s office and asked if he’d heard anything from Mrs. Cottrell.

Ambrose was reading the sports section of the Trib. “No,” he said. “Why?”

“When I saw her last week, I had the sense she might bail out.”

Ambrose shrugged. “No great loss. We already have Jim and Linda Stratton for Many Farms. Two parents there is plenty.”

Russ was bewildered. A month earlier, when he and Ambrose had worked out the adviser assignments, he’d made sure that Frances was in his group.

“I thought—” he said. “That’s not right. We had Mrs. Cottrell down for Kitsillie.”

“Yeah, I switched her out and gave you Ted Jernigan. If she wants to wear blue jeans and hang out with the kids, she can do that in Many Farms. I’m not even sure why she’s coming—she kind of pulled a fast one on me.”

“You underestimate her. She’s in my Tuesday women’s circle. She really gets it.”

“Then we’ll see how she does in Many Farms.”

“No. She needs to be in Kitsillie.”

The eyes that flicked up from the sports pages were unpleasantly shrewd. “Why?”

“Because I’ve worked with her. I want her in my group.”

Ambrose nodded as if something made sense to him. “You know, I did wonder. Back in December, I wondered what moved you to come and see me. It was only because she’d been in my office the same day. She was hell-bent on going to Arizona, and then there you were, wanting to go to Arizona. I’m not taking anything away from the courage of what you did—I just had a little glimmer of wondering. I wouldn’t have thought of it if it weren’t for the business with you and Sally Perkins.”

“Mrs. Cottrell is thirty-seven years old.”

“I’m not judging you, Russ. Only saying I know you.”

“Then tell me this. Why did you swap her and Ted Jernigan? To spite me?”

“Cool your jets. I don’t care what you do on your own time. Just keep it out of Crossroads.”

“You need to put her back in Kitsillie.”

“Nope.”

“Please, Rick. I’m not demanding—I’m asking. Please do me this favor.”

Ambrose shook his head. “I’m not running a dating service.”

It seemed to Russ, as it had all winter, that every piece of good news—in this case, that Frances was evidently still on for Arizona—came paired with news more than bad enough to negate it. Ambrose had seen through him, and there was nothing he could do. He had no grounds for appeal beyond his having imagined a long walk alone with Frances, a hike up into the pinyon forest, a first kiss on a wind-scoured hilltop; and this was no argument at all. The Lord was with Ambrose.

When Russ went home that night, Becky informed him that she wasn’t coming on Spring Trip. A day earlier, he would have been relieved to hear it—she and her friends had signed up for Kitsillie, where she would have observed his attentions to Frances—but now it only seemed like another sign of their estrangement. Under the influence of Tanner Evans, Becky was becoming ever more hippieish and defiant, and she’d been staying out to all hours, even during the week. When Russ had tried to impose a weeknight curfew, she’d run to Marion, which had led to an impasse, resolved in Becky’s favor.

“I thought you were looking forward to the trip,” he said.

She was sprawled on the living-room sofa with her Bible. In her hands, in the militancy of her rejection of him, the Bible was oddly distasteful.

“Yeah,” she said, “I’m not into it.”

The hippieish locution into it was also distasteful. “Into the trip? Or Crossroads generally?”

“Both. It’s like Ambrose said—it’s more of a psychological experiment than Christianity. It’s teenybopper relationship dramas.”

“I seem to recall that you’re still a teenager yourself.”

“Ha ha good point.”

“I’d looked forward to some time with you in Arizona. Is the idea that you’ll be alone here?”

“That is the idea, yes.”

“I hope you won’t burn the house down with some party.”

She gave him an insulted look and reopened her Bible. He no longer understood her at all, but it was true that her social life now seemed to consist of Tanner Evans. Because she and Russ and Perry had planned to go to Arizona, Marion was taking Judson to Los Angeles for spring vacation, treating him to Disneyland and visiting her uncle Jimmy, who was in a nursing home there. The trip was an extravagance, but Russ had known better than to argue, and Marion’s absence was a problem only now that Becky had decided to stay home. Very probably, Becky intended to use the empty parsonage to sleep with Tanner, which was another distasteful thought, mitigated only by Russ’s fondness for Tanner. Despite her new religiosity, Becky dressed and carried herself like someone sexually active—he really didn’t understand her. He only knew she’d never be his little girl again.

Early the next morning, he awakened with an idea so obvious he was amazed he hadn’t seen it sooner: Keith Durochie had told him not to go to Kitsillie. Keith had said that there was plenty of work in Many Farms, and who was Russ to argue with a Navajo elder? More to the point: Who was Ambrose?

A path to a week with Frances clear ahead of him, he went to his church office and waited until the hour was late enough to call Keith’s house. The woman who answered, on the fifteenth or twentieth ring, was not Keith’s wife.

“He’s at the hospital,” she said. “He’s sick.”

Russ asked what had happened, but apparently the woman had said all she could. Distressed, he called the offices of the tribal council, which Keith was a longtime member of, and learned from a secretary that Keith had suffered a stroke. How bad a stroke Russ couldn’t ascertain—the Navajos had taboos regarding illness. Setting aside his distress about Keith, he said he was arriving with three busloads of teenagers on Saturday night and needed to know where to go. The secretary connected him, through a loudly buzzing internal line, to a council administrator whose first name was Wanda and whose family name he didn’t catch. Perhaps because of the buzzing, she spoke with plangent enunciation.

“Russ,” she said, “you do not have to worry. We know that you are coming. You do not have to worry that we are not expecting you.”

Over the buzzing, Russ explained that Keith had suggested he avoid the mesa and go to Many Farms instead. To this, there was no response from Wanda, only buzzing.

“Wanda? Can you hear me?”

“Let me be completely honest and straightforward with you,” she said plangently. “Keith has had trouble on the mesa, but we have a federal mandate. There is work to be done at Kitsillie to conform with the mandate. We have delivered cement and lumber to the school, and we will be very grateful for your help.”

“Ah—mandate?”

“It is a federal mandate and we have supplies for you. One of the women from the chapter has agreed to cook for you, as you requested in your letter. Her name is Daisy Benally.”

“Yes, I know Daisy. But Keith seemed to feel we’d be better off in Many Farms.”

“We know that a group is coming to Many Farms. All of the arrangements are in place.”

“Well, then, maybe, if you could accommodate two groups there, instead of one—”

“Russ, I am speaking to you in all respect. We are not expecting two groups in Many Farms. I will personally meet you here on Saturday and explain the work that we are hoping you will do at Kitsillie to conform with the mandate. I will look forward to meeting you.”

Russ felt powerless against Wanda’s plangency, all the more so as a bilagáana. He hoped she might be easier to talk to in person, or that Keith would be well enough recovered to overrule her.

On Thursday night, after a long effort to fall asleep, he dreamed he was alone and lost on the Black Mesa, trying to get down from a trackless mountain. Far below him, he saw sheep and horses in a rock-strewn paddock, but to reach the trail leading down he had to climb higher, on ever stonier and steeper slopes. The terrain was unexpectedly vast, and the direction he was climbing seemed wrong, but he had to keep going to make sure. Finally he reached a cliff impossible to scale. Looking back, he saw that he was on a slope too nearly vertical to be descended. He saw sheer rock and yawning space and understood that he was going to die. Coming awake, in the barrenness of his marital bed, he recognized his situation. No path with joy at the end of it could be as arduous and convoluted as attaining Frances had become.

But this was a wee-hour recognition. By the time the buses rolled into the First Reformed parking lot, twelve hours later, his path seemed clear again. If Frances would only show up, he could sort things out in Many Farms. A cold March breeze was blowing, daffodils blooming along the church’s limestone flanks, the sun bright, the air chilly. In his old sheepskin coat, a clipboard in hand, Russ directed seminarians and alumni advisers in their toting of Crossroads tool chests, cans of Ballerina Pink and Sunshine Yellow, crates of rollers and brushes, Coleman lanterns. A parent adviser, Ted Jernigan, pulled up beside Russ in a late-model Lincoln and suggested that he load the buses closer to the church doors. Ted nodded at the seminarian Carolyn Polley, who was struggling with a tool chest. “That little girl is going to get hurt.”

Russ held up his clipboard, to indicate his supervisory role. “Feel free to pitch in.”

Ted seemed disinclined. He was a real-estate lawyer, a soloist in the church choir, a beefy former U.S. Marine, and thought very well of himself.

“I’m concerned about drinking water,” he said. “Do we have drinking water?”

“No.”

“Why don’t I run down to Bev-Mart and buy us a bunch of five-gallon bottles. Darra said some of the kids last year had diarrhea.”

“I doubt it was from the water.”

“Simple enough to bring some.”

“A hundred and twenty kids, eight days—that’s a lot of bottles.”

“Better safe than sorry.”

“The water on the reservation comes from wells. It’s not a problem.”

Ted made the face of a man unused to deferring. It was a mistake, Russ thought, to bring a male parishioner on a trip where he would be subordinate to a junior minister. Russ could well imagine Ted’s opinion of him and his pastoral impracticality, his feeble salary, his indetectable contribution to the general good. The opinion was subtly implicit in Ted’s offer to buy water—to open his fee-fattened wallet, to effortlessly exercise his spending power. Putting him in Russ’s group had been selfish of Ambrose, if not deliberately cruel.

As the family cars streamed in, releasing kids in their paint-smeared jeans and their dirtiest coats, with their Frisbees and their sleeping bags, Russ had eyes for only one car. From within the misery of his suspense he glimpsed the relief of being free of Frances, of receiving a definitive no and moving on, of being anywhere else but where he was. When he finally spied her car on Pirsig Avenue, his misery made the moment of reckoning—whether she was joining him or simply dropping off Larry—feel curiously weightless. Thy will be done. As if for the first time, he appreciated the peace these words afforded.

The peace lasted until she stepped out of her car, wearing her hunting cap. When he saw Larry open the trunk and remove not only a fancy backpack, suitable for alpine trekking, but a large and feminine fabric suitcase, he was flooded with voluptuous presentiment. It swept away his equanimity, exposed its falseness, stopped his breath. He was going to have her.

Secure in his presentiment, he busied himself with his clipboard, checking off the names of Crossroads members in the Kitsillie group. Unlike three years ago, bus assignments were now determined by destination, not by clique. Someone, presumably Ambrose, had drawn a heavy line through Becky’s name. Russ still half hoped and half feared that Becky would change her mind, but when he saw her and Perry pull up in the family Fury, without Marion along to drive it home, he knew she wasn’t coming. She didn’t even get out of the car while Perry retrieved his duffel bag.

As the Fury left the parking lot, Frances marched up to Russ. He pretended to consult his clipboard. “Oh hey,” he said.

Her eyes were glittering with drama. “You didn’t think I’d do it, did you. You didn’t think I had the guts. It looks like you’re stuck with me and my phony self-reproach after all.”

He struggled not to smile. “That remains to be seen.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re not going to Kitsillie. Rick wants you in the Many Farms group.”

She drew her head back. “In Larry’s group? Are you kidding me?”

“Nope.”

“Larry doesn’t want me anywhere near him. Why did Rick do that?”

“You’d have to ask him.”

“Does he think I can’t hack it on the mesa?”

“You’d have to ask him.”

“That is extremely annoying. I hope you didn’t make him do that.”

Russ had won the fight against smiling. “No. Why would I?”

“Because you’re mad at me.”

“It was Rick’s decision, not mine. Take it up with him if you’re not happy.”

“The only reason I came was to be with you on the mesa. Well, not the only reason. But I am very, very annoyed.”

In her face was the disappointment of a spoiled child, a slighted VIP. Maybe she was thinking of the Acapulco trip that she’d forgone.

“Who took my place?” she said. “Who’s going with you?”

“Ted Jernigan, Judy Pinella. Craig Dilkes, Biff Allard. Carolyn Polley.”

“Oh great.” She rolled her eyes. Russ wondered if his jealousy-provoking gambit might actually have worked. As he watched her stalk away, the arduousness of the long path behind him felt like nothing. She wanted to be with him, and he’d managed to conceal his delight.

Echoes of Biff Allard’s bongo drums were bouncing off the bank across the street, cigarette smoke and Frisbees in the air, a black dog in a bandanna hurdling guitar cases and hand luggage, kids dashing in and out of the church on missions of adolescent urgency, mothers lingering to embarrass long-haired sons with loving injunctions, the three bus drivers and the swing driver conferring over a road atlas, Rick Ambrose standing in his army jacket beside Dwight Haefle, who’d come outside to behold the glory of it all. As Frances walked up to the two men, Russ averted his eyes (Thy will be done) and went looking for the Kitsillie kids whose names were still unchecked. They were due to leave in ten minutes, at five o’clock, and the buses were still empty. There were last-minute runs to the drugstore, tragic partings of friends on different buses, the suitcase in need of late excavation from a luggage bay, the forgotten sack dinner, and, as always, in Russ’s experience, the one or two kids who were late.

“David Goya?” he shouted. “Kim Perkins? Anybody seen them?”

“I think they’re upstairs,” someone said.

Inside the church, as he climbed the upper stairs, he heard voices go silent at his approach. Sitting in the Crossroads meeting room, on a pair of legless couches, were David Goya, Kim Perkins, Keith Stratton, and Bobby Jett. Cool kids all; friends of Becky and Perry. Russ sensed that he’d caught them doing something wrong, but he didn’t see or smell anything forbidden.

“Guys, come on,” he said from the doorway. “We need you downstairs.”

Glances were exchanged. Kim, in stiffly new blue overalls, jumped up and gestured to the others. “We’re going, okay? Let’s just go.”

Keith and Bobby looked to David as if the decision was his.

“You guys go,” he said.

“What’s going on?” Russ said. “Do you have something to tell me?”

“No, no, no,” Kim said.

She pushed past him, out the door. Keith and Bobby followed, and Russ waited for David to explain. The agedness of David’s face and hair was so peculiar, it might have been endocrine.

“Seen Perry?” he said.

“Yes. Why?”

“Let me put it differently. Does Perry seem okay to you?”

Before the question was even out of David’s mouth, Russ intuited its pertinence. The scenario that came to him was complete and convincing: Perry would contrive to mess things up at the last minute, and all would be lost with Frances.

“Let’s go downstairs,” he said to David. “You and I can talk on the bus.”

“You haven’t noticed anything. He hasn’t seemed at all strange to you.”

It was true that Perry had been notably scarce in recent weeks, more like his former furtive self, no longer rising so early, but Russ said nothing. He needed to keep the bad scenario at bay.

“I saw him last night,” David said, “and he wasn’t making any sense. He can be that way sometimes—his brain works too fast to keep up with. But this seemed different. More like a problem with the entire circuit board. The reason I mention it is I’m concerned he might be violating the rules.”

Time was passing. Things of interest to Russ were happening in the parking lot. He forced himself to focus on the matter at hand. “So, you think—has he been smoking pot again?”

“Not to my knowledge. Laudably or regrettably, that appears to be a thing of the past—I gather he made some kind of promise to you. My concern here is that I violate the rules myself if I fail to report a rules violation. My concern is that even now, as we speak, he isn’t unimpaired.”

God damn Perry. The scenario now included a call to Marion, explaining that she couldn’t go to Los Angeles because her son was messing up again, to which she might object that she’d already bought her plane tickets, to which Russ would reply that his job obliged him to lead a group in Arizona, whereas she and Judson were going to Los Angeles purely for pleasure, and that, moreover, she was the one who’d insisted that Perry was doing better.

David looked down at his long, bony hands. “I’m not just covering my ass, by the way. Something is definitely not right with him.”

“I appreciate your honesty.”

“Although, having taken the step of mentioning it, I’d be grateful if Kim and Keith and Bobby could be included under the umbrella of immunity.”

“I’ll speak to him,” Russ said. “You get yourself on the bus.”

His fear, as he went downstairs, was both new and familiar. His primary feeling about Perry had always been fear. At first it was fear of his operatic tantrums, later fear of his intellectual acuity, its application to mockeries too subtle to be called out and punished, its implicit piercing of Russ’s every fault and weakness. Now the fear was more existentially parental. He and Marion had brought into the world a being of uncontrollable volition, for whom he was nonetheless responsible.

In the parking lot, kids were mobbing the buses, rushing to claim seats. Looking around for Perry, Russ saw the most wonderful thing. The woman he wanted was standing by the Kitsillie bus. The driver was stowing her suitcase below. With a more delicious kind of fear, Russ hurried over to her.

“Here I am,” she said aggressively. “Like it or not.”

“What happened?”

She shrugged. “Dwight saved the day. I asked Rick why I wasn’t going to the mesa, and you know what he said? That you could use another man up there. I told him that was incredibly demeaning to me. I told him Larry’s at an age where the last thing he wants is his mother in his hair. I said maybe Rick should tell Larry he’d ruined his whole trip. And you know Dwight, always the diplomat. He asks Rick if there’s anyone I can trade places with. Which it turns out Judy Pinella is perfectly happy to do. I don’t know what Rick was thinking, but if he thinks I don’t care if I get the full experience, up on the mesa, he doesn’t know me.”

She was full of self-regard, full of entitlement, and Russ was smitten with every bit of it.

“Plus,” he suggested, “you and I get to be together.”

She made a coy face. “Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?”

“It’s a good thing.”

“Maybe you don’t hate me so much after all?”

This time, there was no suppressing a smile, but it didn’t matter—she obviously knew very well how he felt. It was inconceivable to her that anyone could resist her. And this, more than anything else, had set the hook in him. He couldn’t get enough of her self-love.

Flush with the likelihood of possessing it, of carnally penetrating it, commingling with it, he went to look for Perry. As he passed the Rough Rock bus, he saw Ambrose staring at him. His lip was curled with impotent disgust. There was no more pretending that the two of them weren’t enemies. It was frightening but also thrilling, because this time Russ had won.

Inside the Many Farms bus, kids were piling onto seats already taken, clambering over backrests. At the door stood Kevin Anderson, a second-year seminarian with a deep-pile mustache and the soft brown eyes of a seal pup. Before Russ could ask him if he’d seen Perry, Kevin asked him the same question. Apparently Perry had not been seen since he checked in.

Russ’s intuition of warning signs ignored, of necessary actions not taken, returned in force. The sun had sunk behind the church’s roofline but was still shining on the bank clock, which showed eight minutes past five. Except for Perry, the buses appeared to be fully loaded. Car engines were starting up, a few determined parents lingering to wave good-bye. It occurred to Russ that they could simply leave without Perry—let Marion deal with the fallout. But Kevin, whose heart was as soft as his eyes, insisted that they look inside the church.

Spring-smelling air followed them in through doors still propped open. Kevin ran upstairs, calling Perry’s name, while Russ checked the ground floor. Not just the air but the emptiness of the hallway, which minutes ago had teemed with activity, had a flavor of Easter. In the middle chapters of the Gospels, crowds of people followed Jesus everywhere, gathering around him on the Mount, receiving fishes and loaves by the five thousand and the four thousand, welcoming him with palm fronds on the road into Jerusalem, but in the late chapters the focus narrowed to scenes of individual departure, private pain. The Last Supper: clandestine and death-haunted. Peter alone with his betrayals. Judas going away to hang himself. Jesus feeling forsaken on the cross. Mary Magdalene weeping at the sepulcher. The crowds had dispersed and everything was over. The worst thing in human history had happened sickeningly fast, and now it was another Sunday morning in Judea, the first day of the Jewish week, a particular spring morning with a particular spring smell to the air. Even the truth revealed that morning—the truth of Christ’s divinity and resurrection—was austere in its transcendence of human particularity, in its own way no less melancholy. Spring to Russ was a season more of loss than of joy.

In the first-floor men’s room, even before he saw Perry’s feet in the farther stall, he sensed an airless stickiness, a male adolescent anxious to be left alone.

“Perry?”

The voice in the stall was muffled. “Yeah, Dad. One second.”

“Are you not feeling well?”

“Coming coming coming.”

“A hundred and forty people are waiting for you.”

On the rim of the sink were Perry’s wire-framed eyeglasses, newly prescribed for astigmatism. The frames weren’t the least expensive or most rugged that Marion could have let him choose, and indeed he’d already broken them. Finer wire was tightly wound around the damaged bridge.

The toilet roared, and Perry banged out of the stall, went to the sink, and splashed water on his face. His corduroys, though belted, were halfway down his hips. He no longer had any bottom to speak of; had altogether lost a lot of weight.

“What’s going on?” Russ said.

Perry violently pumped the paper-towel dispenser and tore off a yard-long sheet. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Everything is A-OK.”

“You don’t seem right to me.”

“Just pre-road nerves. A little episode of you-know-what.”

But there was no smell of diarrhea in the air.

“Are you on drugs?”

“Nope.” Perry put on his glasses and snagged his knapsack from the stall. “All set.”

Russ gripped him by his scrawny shoulder. “If you’re on drugs, I can’t let you on the bus.”

“Drugs, drugs, what kind of drugs.”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, there you go. I’m not on drugs.”

“Look me in the eye.”

Perry did so. His face was blotched with crimson, clear mucus seeping from his nose. “I swear to God, Dad. I’m clean as a whistle.”

“You don’t seem clean to me.”

“Clean as a whistle and frankly wondering why you’re asking.”

“David Goya is worried about you.”

“David should worry about his own pot dependency. As a matter of fact, I wonder what a search of his luggage might turn up.” Perry held up his knapsack. “You’re free to search mine. Go ahead and pat me down. I’ll even drop my pants, if you can stand the embarrassment.”

He was giving off a very sour mildew smell. Russ had never felt more repelled by him, but he didn’t have hard enough evidence to send him home to Marion. Time was passing, and the responsibility was his. He made himself take it.

“I want you in Kitsillie with me. You can have Becky’s place.”

A laugh burst from Perry like a sneeze.

“What?” Russ said.

“Could there be anything that either of us wants less than that?”

“I’m concerned that you don’t seem well.”

“I’m trying to help you, Dad. Don’t you want me to help you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll stay out of your business if you’ll stay out of mine.”

“My business is your welfare.”

“Then you must be—” Perry snickered. “Very busy.” He shouldered his knapsack and wiped his nose.

“Perry, listen to me.”

“I’m not going to Kitsillie. You’ve got your business, I’ve got mine.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

“Really? You think I don’t know why you’re going on this trip? It would be too hilarious if I knew it and you didn’t. Do you need me to spell it out for you? She’s a total F-O-X. And I don’t mean some esoteric oxyfluoride salt of xenon, although, interestingly, they’ve synthesized some salts like that, in spite of the supposed completeness of xenon’s outermost electron shell, which you’d think couldn’t happen, and, yes, I realize I digress. My point in mentioning chemistry was that it’s not the point, but you must admit it’s pretty incredible. Everyone assumed that xenon was inert, I mean it’s such a credit to the fluorine atom—its oxidizing powers. Wouldn’t you agree that it’s incredible?”

Perry smiled at Russ as if he believed he was following his nonsense and enjoying it.

“You need to calm down,” Russ said. “I’m not at all sure you should be coming with us.”

“I’m talking about a valence of zero, Dad. If we’re comparing your qualifications with mine, do you even know what a chemical valence is?”

Russ made a helpless gesture.

“I didn’t think so.”

Outside the bathroom, in the hallway, Kevin Anderson was calling Perry’s name.

“Coming,” Perry shouted cheerfully.

Before Russ could stop him, he was out the door.

Glancing at the mirror above the sink, he was dismayed to see a father with responsibilities. What he wanted more than anything was to have nothing to do with his son. At the thought of letting Perry’s disturbance and his mildew stink be Kevin’s problem, he felt a melting warmth in his loins. The warmth, which also related to Frances, plainly told him that the thought was evil. But every other scenario—getting Ambrose involved, locating Marion and making her deal with Perry, forcibly removing Perry from the bus, forgoing the trip himself or dragging Perry to Kitsillie—seemed worse than the next. Each of them would grossly delay the group’s departure, and Frances was waiting on the bus. To have her even once seemed worth whatever price God might later make him pay.

After Jesus had returned to his friends, eaten breakfast with them, let them touch him, he ascended to heaven and was never on earth again in body. What followed, as recounted in Acts, was a radical insurgency. The earliest Christians had all things in common—sold their possessions, shared whatever they had—and were militant in their counterculture. They never passed up a chance to remind the Pharisees of their hand in nailing the Christ to a tree. Their leaders were persecuted and forever on the run, but their ranks kept growing. It no doubt helped that Peter and Paul could perform miracles, but more crucial was Peter’s inspiration to extend his ministry to the Gentiles. From a fire that had started within the Jewish community and might have been safely contained there, sparks flew into the greater Roman Empire. Paul, who’d begun his career as the most zealous of persecutors, holding the cloaks of the mob that stoned Stephen to death, was the most tireless of the fire spreaders. When last seen, in Acts, he’d made it all the way to Rome and was living, unmolested, in a rented house. Unmolested but still an outsider, still an insurgent.

What gave the new religion its edge was its paradoxical inversion of human nature, its exalting of poverty and rejection of worldly power, but a religion founded on paradox was inherently unstable. Once the old religions had been routed, the insurgents became the Pharisees. They became the Holy Roman Church and did their own persecuting, fell into their own complacency and corruption, and betrayed the spirit of Christ. Antithetical to power, the spirit took refuge and expressed itself in opposition—in the gentle renunciations of Saint Francis, the violent rebellion of the Reformation. True Christian faith always burned from the edge.

And no one understood this better than the Anabaptists. They began as a rebuke to the Reformation in northern Europe, which had retained the practice of universal infant baptism. For the Anabaptists, the voluntary choice of baptism, as an adult, was decisive. The book of Acts, an account of Christians so original that some of them had known Jesus personally, abounded with stories of adults seeing the light and requesting baptism. The Anabaptists were radical in the strict sense, returning to the earliest roots of their faith. They were correspondingly feared by Reformation authorities, such as Zwingli, and cruelly persecuted—banished, tortured, burned at the stake—in the first half of the sixteenth century. The effect was to confirm the radicalism of the Anabaptists who survived. In the Bible, after all, to be Christian was to suffer persecution.

Four centuries later, when Russ was a boy, memories of Anabaptist martyrdom were still vivid. The stories of Felix Manz and Michael Sattler, and of others killed for their beliefs, were part of the group identity of his parents’ Mennonite community, part of its apartness, in the farm country around Lesser Hebron, Indiana. The kingdom of heaven would never encircle the earth, but it could be approached on a small scale in rural communities that practiced self-sufficiency, lived in strict accordance with the Word, and pointedly removed themselves from the present age. The Mennonites chose to be “the quiet in the land.” To aspire to more was to risk losing all.

The Anabaptists of Lesser Hebron weren’t Old Order—they used machines; the men wore ordinary clothes—and they weren’t as communist as the Hutterites, but Russ as a boy heard little of the wider world and saw little of money. When he was twelve, he worked a long unpaid summer for a couple who’d lost their son to influenza, Fritz and Susanna Niedermayer, milking their cows and shoveling their manure in the assurance that they’d have done the same for the Hildebrandts had their situations been reversed. His older sisters disappeared for months at a time, helping families with new babies and leaving Russ with extra duties on the small farm his mother owned. They had a few cows, a large garden and a larger orchard, and ten acres for row crops that must have earned a bit of cash.

Like his own father before him, Russ’s father was the pastor of the church in Lesser Hebron. Unlike other men in the community, he wore a long, collarless coat that buttoned at the neck. In the parlor of the family’s house in town was a cabinet containing birth and marriage records, minutes of Anabaptist councils from more disputatious eras, and genealogies stretching back to Europe. Small groups of men could be found in the parlor at all hours of the day, conferring with his father and courteously accepting slices of his mother’s pies. There seemed to be no limit to their patience in maintaining their apartness, their nonconforming obedience to the Word. A dispute between neighbors or a fine point of worship could occupy them for weeks before his father effected a reconciliation.

Blessed are the peacemakers: Russ was proud of his father but afraid of his seriousness, his forbidding coat, the sober male voices in the parlor. He preferred the kitchen and felt closer to God there. His mother worked fourteen and sixteen hours a day, placid in her plain dress and her hair covering. According to Scripture, earthly life was but a moment, but the moment seemed spacious when he was with her. In the time it took her to listen, actively, with clear-hearted questions, to one story he had to tell from school or the farm, she could make dough for a pie crust and roll it out, core and slice apples, and assemble a pie. And then, neither pausing nor rushing, she was on to the next chore. She made emulating Christ seem effortlessly rewarding. It horrified Russ to think that, four hundred years earlier, a person so quietly devout might have been put to death; it filled him with pity for the martyrs.

His other favorite place was the blacksmith shop of his mother’s father, his Opa Clement, whose work included the repair of automobiles and tractors. Clement showed Russ how to hold a glowing horseshoe with tongs, how to use tin snips to fashion cookie cutters (a Christmas present for Russ’s mother in 1936), how to rebuild a carburetor, how to hammer out a dented wheel and check its roundness with calipers. Clement’s wife had died before Russ was born, and although he had his daughter’s meditative way of working, her limpid rightness with the things around him, he’d become eccentric in his solitude. He subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post, neglected his shaving and bathing, and sometimes omitted to worship with his brethren. At the end of an afternoon when Russ had helped him, he reached into the pocket of his pinstripe overalls, removed a fistful of money, and invited Russ to choose, from his blackened hand, any coin that had silver in it. Even as a teenager, Russ was too innocently devout to spend the money only on himself. It was unthinkable not to get his mother something, a package of gingersnaps, a bottle of peppermint extract.

Except for rendering taxes unto the government, as Jesus had sensibly advised, the community was quietly but firmly anti-state. They schooled their children separately, avoided polling places and courts of law, and declined to swear on the Bible if called as witnesses. Most central to their identity was their pacifism. On few points was the Gospel clearer than on the incompatibility of violence with love. As the community’s pastor, in 1917, Russ’s paternal grandfather had contended, on the one hand, with the anger and prejudice of non-Mennonite farmers—rocks thrown through windows of the Kaiser-lovers, a barn defaced with ugly words—and, on the other, with families in his congregation who’d permitted their sons to go to war. Two of the families eventually quit the community.

Russ was seventeen when the country entered the Second World War. He would have been obliged to lodge an objection of conscience sooner if the president of the local draft board hadn’t grown up on a farm adjoining the Niedermayers’. Cal Sanborn liked and admired the Mennonites and did everything he could to protect their sons. Russ was among the last to be called up, in 1944, and by then he’d completed five semesters at Goshen College. He’d also had his first crisis of faith, not in Jesus Christ but in his parents.

He’d enjoyed his classes at Goshen, but his only close friend was likewise the son of a pastor. In his ungainly tallness, as in the seriousness he’d inherited from his father, he felt uncomfortable with the earthier and more athletic boys, especially when their talk turned to girls. His father had told him that there would be girls at the college, and that he shouldn’t shy from fellowship with them, but Russ couldn’t look at a girl without thinking of his mother. Even to return a girl’s friendly smile was somehow to offend against the person he most loved and revered; it made him queasy. The cure was to take a walk of five or ten miles, in the country around the college, until his body was exhausted and his soul open to grace.

In his third semester he studied European history, and he was keen to hear what Clement, who paid attention to the world, had to say about the war. The blacksmith shop, with its bellows and its potbellied stove, was especially congenial at Christmastime. Each tool in it was known to Russ, each evoked memories of afternoons slowed and deepened by unspoken love. Each year at Christmas there was also a new tool, for Russ to keep as a gift, a hammer or a coping saw, an auger drill, a set of chisels. He felt bad about how little he’d used the gifts, but Clement assured him that someday they would come in handy. Russ’s experiences of grace seemed to presage a future as a pastor, like his father, and the only tool his father had any skill with was his letter opener, but he imagined that when he was settled, with a wife and family, he might take up woodworking as a hobby, a little eccentricity of his own.

Lesser Hebron was buried in snow when he got home. His father took him into the parlor, shut the door, and told him that Opa Clement wasn’t coming for Christmas and that Russ was not to visit him. “Clement is a drunkard and an adulterer,” his father explained. “We’re resolved to avoid him in the hope that he’ll repent.”

Greatly upset, Russ went to his mother for a fuller explanation and permission to see her father. He got the explanation—Opa Clement had taken up with an unmarried schoolteacher, a woman scarcely older than thirty, and had been drinking whiskey when his brethren went to reason with him—but not the permission. Although their community didn’t practice strict shunning, his mother said, a higher standard applied to a pastor’s family, and this included Russ.

“But it’s Opa. I can’t be home for Christmas and not see Opa.”

“We’re praying that he’ll repent,” his mother said placidly. “Then we can all be together again.”

Her equanimity was consonant with the primacy of Christ in her life, the secondary nature of everything else. The commandment to honor one’s parents came from the Old Testament. In the New Testament, although the rejoicing at a sinner’s reclamation was hundredfold, the sinner was first required to repent. Never mind an offending parent—you were supposed to pluck your own offending eye out. His mother was only as radical as the Gospel itself.

On Christmas morning, on the snow-dusted porch of their house, Russ found a small chest of white oak, the size of a child’s coffin. The wood was smoothly planed and fragrant, the brass fittings stippled with hand manufacture. Inside it was a note. For Russell on Christmas, I reckon you have enough tools to fill this, Love from your Opa.

Russ, weeping, carried the chest inside. He wept again later in the morning, when his father instructed him to get an ax and chop it up for kindling.

“No,” he said, “that’s a waste. Someone else can use it.”

“You will do as I say,” his father said. “I want you to look into the fire and watch it burn.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” his mother said mildly. “Let’s just put it away for now. My father may yet repent.”

“He won’t,” his father said. “Nothing in this world is certain, but I know his mind better than you do. Russell will do as I say.”

“No,” Russ said.

“You will obey me. Go and get an ax.”

Russ put on his overcoat, took the chest outside, as if he intended to obey, and carried it through the streets of Lesser Hebron. Because he loved his grandfather and love was the essence of the Gospel, he didn’t even feel defiant. He felt, instead, that his parents were somehow mistaken.

The blacksmith shop was shuttered, chimney smoke rising from the low rooms in back. Russ was less afraid of his father’s wrath than of finding his grandfather with a harlot, but Clement was alone in his little kitchen, boiling coffee on the woodstove. He looked like a new man—closely shaved and freshly barbered, his fingernails clean. Russ explained what had happened.

“I’ve made my peace with it,” Clement said. “I already lost your mother when she married, and that’s as it should be. No more than what the Scripture asks.”

“She’s praying for you. She wants you to—repent.”

“I don’t hold it against her. Your father, yes, but not her. She’s godlier than any of us. If Estelle were baptized again and married me, I don’t doubt that your mother would accept her. But I’ll be a sick old man soon enough. I don’t want Estelle feeling she has to take care of me. It’s blessing enough to have her now.”

The verb to have, the very name Estelle, the carnality they evoked, made Russ queasy.

“If God can’t forgive me,” Clement said, “so be it. But who’s to say if your father knows what God forgives? I’ve been to the Lutheran church, over to Dobbsville, with Estelle. Good people, plenty Christian—there are many ways to skin a cat. I can’t say as I’ve tried any of them, but I’ve skinned a raccoon, and the adage has it right. There are different ways of doing it.”

Leaving the beautiful chest safe with Clement, Russ went home and confessed to his mother what he’d done. She kissed him and forgave him, but his father never really did, because Russ had made his choice. When he went to Arizona and discovered for himself the different ways a cat could be skinned, the only disclosive letters he wrote were to his grandfather.

The alternative service camp was in the national forest outside Flagstaff, on the site of a former CCC camp. It was administered by the American Friends Service Committee, but a good third of the workers shared Russ’s faith. After he’d shoveled dirt for some months, painted picnic tables, planted trees, the camp director asked him if he could use a typewriter. Though still only twenty, Russ was among the older workers, and he’d had five semesters of college. The director, George Ginchy, set him up with a foot-tall Remington, its keys yellowed to the color of custard, in the antechamber of his office. Although Ginchy was a Quaker, from Pennsylvania, he was also a longtime college football coach and Boy Scout leader. His camp had a bugler who began the day with reveille and ended it with taps, a cook whose job title was quartermaster, and now, in Russ, an aide-de-camp. Ginchy liked everything about military life except the killing part.

One morning in the spring of 1945, the sun rose on a dusty black relic of a truck parked outside headquarters. Inside it, upright and silent, since sometime in the night, had been sitting four Navajo men in black felt hats. They were elders from Tuba City and had come to petition the camp director. George Ginchy welcomed them, widened his eyes at Russ, and asked him to bring coffee. Taking a pot into the office, Russ found three of the Navajo men standing against a wall with their arms crossed, the fourth studying a framed topo map in the corner, all of them silent.

Russ had never seen an Indian before, and he had so little worldly experience that he didn’t recognize the sensation in his heart as love at first sight. He thought the Navajos’ faces moved him because they were old. And yet, if he’d been asked to describe their leader, who wore a turquoise-clasped string tie beneath a fleece-collared coat, stiff with dirt, he might have used the word beautiful.

Ginchy uncomfortably said, “How can I help you gentlemen?”

One of them murmured in a strange tongue. The leader addressed Ginchy. “What are you doing here?”

“We, ah—this is a service camp for men with a conscientious objection to war.”

“Yes. What are you doing?”

“Specifically? It’s a bit of a hodgepodge. We’re improving the national forest.”

This seemed to amuse the Navajos. There were chuckles, an exchange of glances. The leader nodded at the pine trees outside and explained, “It’s a forest.”

“Land of many uses,” Ginchy said. “I believe that is the Forest Service motto. You’ve got your logging, your hunting, your fishing, your watershed protection. We’re improving the basis for all that. My guess is, somebody knew the right people in Washington.”

A silence fell. Russ offered a mug of coffee to the leader, who wore a wide silver ring on his thumb, and asked if he wanted sugar.

“Yes. Five spoons.”

When Russ returned from the antechamber, the leader was explaining to Ginchy what he wanted. The federal government, through its agents, had impoverished the Navajos by requiring severe reductions of their stock of cattle, sheep, and horses, and by unfairly siding with the Hopis in their land disputes. Now the country was fighting a war in which the Navajos sent their young men to fight, and conditions were bad on the reservation—fertile land eroding, the remaining stock fenced out of good pasture, too few able hands available for restoration work.

“War is bad for everyone,” Ginchy agreed.

“You are the federal government. You have strong young men who won’t fight. Why help a forest that doesn’t need helping?”

“I’m sympathetic, but I’m not actually the federal government.”

“Send us fifty men. You feed them, we’ll shelter them.”

“Yeah, that’s … We have procedures here, roll calls and so forth. If I sent people to your reservation, they’d be off my reservation, if you take my meaning.”

“Then you come, too. Move your camp. There isn’t any work to do here.”

“I don’t have authority for that. If I asked for authority, the government would remember I’m here. I’d rather they not remember.”

“They’ll forget again,” the leader said.

Already, in his first minutes of acquaintance, because he instinctively loved them, Russ grasped that the Navajos weren’t lesser than white men but simply very different. In his later experience, they were unfailingly blunt about what they wanted. They didn’t say please, didn’t bow to convention or authority. Disqualifications self-evident to white men were meaningless to them. White men chalked up the frustrations of dealing with them to orneriness and stupidity, but Russ, that morning, saw nothing stupid in them. It hurt to think that they’d come all the way from Tuba City, a drive of several hours, and sat for further hours in a freezing truck, with an idea that made sense to them. It hurt to think of them returning empty-handed, in some unguessable state of mind—disappointment? Anger at the government? Embarrassment for having been naïve? Or just mute perplexity? Russ had been thirteen when his beloved farm dog, Skipper, fell sick with what his mother said was cancer. The dog’s pain and infirmity soon reached the point where she made Russ ask a neighbor to shoot him and bury him. For Russ the hardest part of saying good-bye had been that Skipper couldn’t understand what he was doing to him, or why. The Navajo elders were the opposite of dumb beasts, but this only made imagining their perplexity more painful.

When the sugared coffee had been drunk, Ginchy took down the elders’ names and offered to send them a truckload of food and clothes. The leader, whose name was Charlie Durochie, was unmoved and didn’t thank him.

“That was a strange one,” Ginchy said when they were gone.

“They’re right, though,” Russ said. “The work here seems like make-work.”

“That’s some other fellow’s decision. I have to tread carefully, you know. Roosevelt wanted the army in charge of these camps.”

“But we’re supposed to be here serving, not building picnic tables.”

“The service I perform is keeping men out of the war. If that means building picnic tables…”

Russ asked him for permission to deliver the supplies to Tuba City.

“They didn’t seem much interested in charity,” Ginchy said.

“They didn’t say no.”

“You have a tender heart.”

“You do, too, sir.”

The next morning, in a truck driven by the quartermaster’s assistant and loaded with flour, rice, beans, and some work clothes left behind in the Depression, Russ rode north to Tuba City. In his innocence, he’d pictured tepees or log cabins in Indian country, tall trees with horses tied to them, clear streams running past mossy stones; he’d actually pictured mossy stones. The arid bleakness of the landscape he entered, after crossing Route 66, had not been imaginable. Dust hung in the air and coated every rock along the road. Lifeless buttes shimmered in the distance. Out on the parched plain were hogans more like piles of refuse than dwellings. In the settlements were houses of unpainted gray wood, roofless adobe ruins with holes in their walls, expanses of ash-darkened sand littered with rusted cans and broken roof tiles. Some of the smaller children, black-haired and round-faced, waved tentatively at the truck. Everyone else—old women wearing leggings beneath their skirts, old men with caved-in mouths, younger women who looked like they’d been born brokenhearted—averted their eyes.

Tuba City was a proper town, better shaded by cottonwoods, but scarcely less bleak. Russ now saw how comparatively much like Lesser Hebron the high forest was; how comparatively paradisal. The streams there were full, the forest double-carpeted with snow and pine needles, everything wet and white and fresh-smelling, and the men there, too—every last one of them—were white. To enter the reservation was to become aware of whiteness. Until he took a train to Arizona, Russ had never been more than sixty miles from Lesser Hebron, and although some of the non-Mennonite farmers had been ruined by the Depression, he’d never seen true privation. The Navajos had been stuck with barren land, seldom rained on. Witnessing their endurance of it, he had a curious sense of inferiority. The Navajos seemed closer to something he hadn’t known he was so far from. He felt, from his white height, like a Pharisee.

“Jesus Christ, this place is depressing,” the assistant quartermaster said.

The house to which they were directed seemed unfittingly tiny for a tribal leader, but a familiar black truck was parked in the dirt outside it, its front end elevated on stacks of earthen bricks. Charlie Durochie was watching a younger man hammer on a wrench connected to the truck’s undercarriage. One of the tires lay next to an emaciated dog licking its penis. From the doorway of the house, which stood open to the cold, a little girl in a frilly, faded dress stared at the white men in their better truck. Russ hopped out and reintroduced himself to Durochie, who was dressed exactly as he’d been the day before.

“What do you have,” Durochie said.

“What Mr. Ginchy promised. Some food, some clothes.”

Durochie nodded as if the delivery were more burden than relief. From beneath the old truck came a thud, a strong oath, a wrench skittering out into the dirt. In Russ’s grandfather’s shop, it was a sin against a wrench to hammer on it. Always better, Clement said, to use leverage.

“Do you have a longer wrench?” Russ couldn’t help asking.

“If I had a longer wrench,” the younger man said coldly, “would I be using this one?”

He reached for the wrench, and Russ extended a hand to shake. “Russ Hildebrandt.”

The man ignored the hand and picked up the wrench. His shoulders were broad in a chamois shirt, his hair tied in a ponytail that had no gray in it. He might have been fifteen years older than Russ, but it was hard to tell with Indian faces.

“Keith is my brother’s son,” Durochie remarked.

In a canvas bag in the cab of the camp truck, Russ found a longer wrench. Keith took it from him as if he expected no less. Russ asked Charlie where they should put the supplies.

“Here,” Charlie said.

“Just on the ground?”

Apparently yes. By the time Russ and his partner had unloaded the sacks of food and two bales of clothing, Charlie had disappeared. The little girl now sat in the dirt watching Keith hammer on a steering arm. “What’s your name?” Russ asked her.

She looked uncertainly at Keith, who stopped hammering. “Her name is Stella.”

“Nice to meet you, Stella.” To Keith, Russ added, “You can keep the wrench.”

“Okay.”

“I wish there were more we could do.”

Keith sighted along the steering arm, checking its shape. Already then, he had a presence that later served him as a tribal politician, a charisma that invited touch and trust. Russ just wanted to keep looking at him. The assistant quartermaster was in the camp truck, tapping his fingers on the wheel. The thing about a Navajo silence was the sense that it could last indefinitely—all day.

“Say we sent a crew up here,” Russ said. “What would we do?”

“I told my uncle not to bother with you. All he got was a broken truck.”

“I’d like to help, though.”

“My uncle thinks from a different time. I try to tell him the new lesson, but he won’t learn.”

“What is the lesson?”

“Your help is worse than no help.”

“But if I came back with a crew? What would be entailed, exactly?”

“Go home, Long Wrench. We don’t want your help.”

When Russ returned to the reservation, two months later, Keith Durochie continued to call him Long Wrench, possibly a reference to his height, more probably to his thinking he knew better. Being given a nickname was traditional, but he didn’t know this when he left that day. He felt disliked by someone he wished had liked him. In the weeks that followed, whenever he had hours of leave in Flagstaff, he went to the library and read what he could find about the Navajos. Despite being intransigent and thieving—to the point where they were rounded up and marched, en masse, to a prison camp in New Mexico—they’d been granted an immense piece of territory, which, according to various authors, and in contrast to the peace-loving, farm-tending Hopis, they’d proceeded to overgraze with herds of horses too numerous to be of practical use. To the U.S. government, the Navajos were a problem to be solved by force. To Russ, who was haunted by their faces, what needed solving was the mystery of them. He later had the same feeling about Marion.

In June, after Germany’s unconditional surrender, when the mood in camp was festive, he again raised the question of the Navajos with Ginchy. “We should be there, not here,” he said. “If I could show you the reservation, you’d see what I mean.”

“You want to go back there,” Ginchy said.

“Yes, sir. Very much.”

“You’re a strange one.”

“How so?”

“A lot of men would kill for what you’ve got. People used to come here and vacation.”

“It doesn’t seem right to be on vacation when other men are dying.”

“You don’t feel fortunate. You’re not happy to be my aide-de-camp.”

“No, sir. I feel very fortunate. But I’d rather serve people in real need.”

“That speaks well of you. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait another twenty months, though.”

Russ’s disappointment must have been obvious. An hour later, when he was typing a report on camp hygiene, Ginchy came out to his desk with a roughly scrawled letter and asked him to do it up on letterhead. Reading the scrawl, Russ felt as though warm syrup were being poured over his head. It was love that worked miracles; no force on earth was more powerful.

To whom it may concern: I am the director of etc. etc. My assistant R.H. wishes to inquire into work needing performance on the N reservation. Please give him any assistance he may require. Yours etc. etc.

“Nobody cares what I do anymore,” Ginchy said. “My only concern is your safety. You can take the old Willys if you can get it running, but you’ll need to bring a partner.”

Though Russ was friendly with the men in his cabin, Ginchy’s favoritism hadn’t endeared him to them, and neither had Russ’s seriousness. The camp was like college that way.

“I’d rather go alone, sir.”

“That’s very Indian of you, but I’m the one in hot water if something happens to you.”

“Things can happen to two people, too.”

“Not as often.”

“I don’t need a partner. You can trust me.”

“That also is Indian. I offer you an apple, and you want the whole basket. Speaking of which—‘Thank you’?”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I will, of course, expect a full formal report.”

For his mission, after he’d repaired the Willys, Russ packed a bedroll, a change of clothes, his Bible, a notebook, twenty dollars of saved allowance, a canteen, toilet paper, and a box of food. He was still so dazzled by his luck that he was halfway down the forest road, on the morning of June 20, before it occurred to him to be afraid. He could be robbed or beaten up. The truck could wind up in a ditch. By the time he reached Tuba City, he ached from the work of keeping the Willys on the road. His shirt was soaked in the June heat.

Neither Charlie Durochie nor his truck was at the little house in town. When Russ found a woman down the street who spoke English, she said that Charlie was gone for the summer and Keith was with his wife’s people, up on the mesa. She nodded in a direction where there was only glare and dusty vacancy, no mesa.

Russ was now additionally afraid that his mission would be a bust, because, in all the vast reservation, he knew only two men to speak to. Inside the baking Willys, he shut his eyes and prayed for strength and guidance. Then he drove in the direction the woman had indicated.

The road up to the mesa was in places barely passable, the country relentlessly deserted but nevertheless dotted with bleached, shriveled cow patties. The Navajo men Russ encountered, one whittling a stick in the shade of an outcropping, two others watering horses at a tank beneath a rusted windmill, seemed to assume that a twenty-one-year-old white man looking for the Fallen Rocks people, as Keith Durochie’s in-laws were evidently known, must have had some reason. The men stressed, in their crude English, that the distance wasn’t short.

He had to stop every half hour to shake his cramped hands. When the air cooled and the shadows grew long, he pulled over by a decrepit stock pen and a tank into which water trickled from a crusty pipe. Small birds, ghostly in the twilight, were drinking from the seepage. The water was bitter, but his canteen was empty. On the mesa road, in six hours, he’d seen two women on a motorbike, one boy with a dog herding sheep, one old man driving a truck with coils of wire strapped to its bed, various free-roaming horses, and nothing resembling a town. He ate pork and beans from a can still warm from the day’s heat. Then, fearing scorpions, he bedded down inside the Willys. He missed George Ginchy. Through the windshield, he could see a sky clotted with stars and nebulae, but he was too homesick for the camp to get out and admire it.

In the cool of early morning, he traveled through an upward-sloping basin forested with juniper and pinyon. Along the road, on flats too dry to be called meadow, sheep grazed among thorny shrubs. There was a magnificent desertion to the country, rutted tracks branching off with mysteries at the end of them, a sense of lives present but hidden. He drove fifteen miles before he saw another person, and then it wasn’t one but a hundred.

Close to the road, beside a corral, were cook fires, horses, some trucks. Older men and women of all ages stood or sat around a structure of tree boughs festooned with scraps of red cloth. When Russ stopped and asked the nearest man, who was saddling a horse, where he might find the Fallen Rocks people, a scent of fried mutton entered the Willys. The man nodded up the road.

“At the chapter house. Follow the wash.”

“What does the chapter house look like?”

The man cinched the saddle and didn’t answer.

A long way farther up the road, Russ came to a neat, unmarked structure of mud and split logs beside a wash. The track next to it looked passable, and he followed it up into a shallow canyon, past fallen rocks the size of haystacks, an encouraging sign. In a side canyon still shaded from the sun, he found a proper small house, a stock pen, a yard with chickens in it. Beyond the pen was a hogan outside which women were cooking on an open fire. In front of the house, a little girl, Stella, was watching her father chop wood. At the sight of Keith Durochie, the tension of Russ’s long drive drained out of him. He felt like he’d come home.

Keith approached the truck, trailed shyly by Stella. “What the hell?”

“I’m back,” Russ said.

“What for?”

“Forgot my wrench.”

There was a silence before Keith smiled. He led Russ into the house, which had two rooms, one with a bed in it, and gave him sweet coffee and a cold, unsweetened sort of doughnut. When Russ explained that he was on a fact-finding mission, Keith said it would have to wait—he was doing a sing. He left Russ alone, by no means for the last time. Life among the Navajos meant a lot of waiting and not much explanation.

What a sing was he learned later in the morning, when a dust cloud boiled up from the canyon. The people he’d passed on the road were now on horses adorned with brightly colored yarn, followed by trucks similarly adorned and tooting their horns. The entourage proceeded past the house to the hogan where the women had been cooking. Nervous but curious, Russ crossed the yard for a closer look.

The lead rider was a short-haired young man whose face was painted black and red; in his hand was a tasseled black stick. He waited in the saddle until others from his group could help him down. Moving with a bad limp, he took the black stick into the hogan. Children were piling from the trucks and running to a shed where the food was. Keith and his kinswomen quietly greeted the adults. No one paid any attention to Russ.

From inside the hogan, a male voice rose tremulously in off-key song. Russ didn’t understand the words, but they went to his heart. The voice was like his grandfather’s, singing hymns in Lesser Hebron; Clement, too, sang off-key. After the song had ended, the hogan erupted like a small volcano, boxes of Cracker Jack flying out through its smoke hole. While the children pounced on them, Keith’s people distributed blankets to the older guests, who’d taken up a different song.

he-ye ye ye ya ŋa

’ėėla do kwii-yi – na

kį gó di yá – ’e – hya ŋa

he ye ye ye ya

Though the language was foreign, the voices of a congregation, raised in bright morning sun, deepened Russ’s sense of having come home. As the singing continued, Keith invited him to join the group for mutton and corn bread.

Only the children, Stella in particular, looked at him, and for a long time Keith was busy hosting. Russ might have grown bored if he hadn’t been so fascinated by the faces. When the party finally broke up, the entourage returning to their horses and trucks, Keith sat down and asked him where he was going next. Russ again mentioned his charge from George Ginchy.

“I told you not to bother,” Keith said.

“You said you’d talk to me after the sing.”

“It just started. We still have three days.”

“Three days?”

“That’s the new way. We don’t do the long sings anymore.”

“The thing is, the only people I know here are you and your uncle.”

“You won’t get to my uncle in your truck.”

“Well, so.”

Keith turned and, for the first time, looked at Russ directly. “What are you doing here?”

“Honestly, I want to know more about your people. The work is just an excuse.”

Keith nodded and said, “That’s better.”

He went to help his kinspeople, and Russ fell asleep on the ground. He was awakened by the smell of gasoline. Keith was filling the tank of a small truck through a funnel with a muslin filter. Already seated on the cargo bed were Stella and a slender young woman with a bundled baby. “You ride in front with me,” Keith said.

Making the woman sit in back didn’t seem right to Russ, but to Keith the matter was already settled. The little truck had a suspension well suited to the rutted canyon road. After a long while, as Keith drove, his silence became so trying that Russ asked him what a sing was.

“We’re helping our friend,” Keith said. “He came back from the Pacific out of harmony. He walks bad, from shrapnel, and he doesn’t sleep—the enemy’s burned flesh is in his nose. The enemy looked like us, not like the bilagáana, and their spirits got inside him. He brought home an enemy shirt that he can smell the war in. It will be part of the sing.”

Though Russ didn’t understand every detail, the communal healing of a man brutalized by war made thrilling sense to him. He had many more questions, but he made himself parcel them out slowly as the truck retraced his morning drive. He learned that the woman in back was Keith’s wife, the baby his two-month-old son. Keith’s father-in-law, riding ahead of them on horseback, carrying the ceremonial black stick, was a medicine man and a friend of Charlie Durochie from a boarding school in Farmington, New Mexico. Keith had attended the same school and worked for some years on oil rigs before he married into the Fallen Rocks clan. He now managed his in-laws’ ranch on the mesa.

Each fact Keith offered seemed to Russ a precious stone. He felt hopelessly inferior to Keith, as lovers do, and was reluctant to take his eyes off him. What Keith thought about Russ was less clear. Russ had the sense of being more than just tolerated, of being at least amusing in his ignorance, but Keith showed little curiosity about him. The only question he asked on the drive was “You a Christian?”

“Yes,” Russ said eagerly. “I’m from the Mennonite faith.”

Keith nodded. “I knew their missionaries.”

“Here? On the reservation?”

“In Tuba City. They were all right.”

“So—are you—do you worship?”

Keith smiled at the road ahead of them. “Everyone drinks Arbuckle’s coffee. All over the world, Arbuckle’s coffee. Your religion is like that— I guess it must be pretty good coffee.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We don’t send our coffee around the world. You have to be born here to drink it.”

“But that’s what I love about the Bible. Anyone, anywhere, can receive the Word—it’s not exclusive.”

“Now you sound like a missionary.”

Russ was surprised to feel ashamed.

Many miles down the main mesa road, they reached an encampment where fires were being built, blankets shaken open, slabs of raw mutton handled, a flaccid basketball kicked around a grassless pasture by shouting boys. Several hundred people were at the camp. The sight of them created a pressure in Russ’s head, a sense of too much immersion too quickly. To relieve it, he set off down the road by himself, into the setting sun.

A raven was croaking, jackrabbits browsing in sagebrush shadows. A snake, both startling and startled, went airborne in its haste to leave the road. As soon as the sun dropped behind a ridge, a breeze came through the valley, carrying smells of warmed juniper and wildflower. Turning back, he saw smoke rising from a distant bonfire, the cliffs behind it pink with alpenglow. He saw that he’d been wrong about the Navajos’ land. The beauty of the national forest was friendly and obvious. The beauty of the mesa was harsher but cut deeper.

Feasting was in progress when he returned to the camp. He hadn’t known to bring anything but the clothes he was wearing, his pocket knife and wallet, so Keith gave him blankets from the truck. Even if Keith’s wife hadn’t been nursing, Russ would have been too shy to speak to her, because she was Keith’s wife. While he ate mutton and beans and bread, competing songs wafted over from other cook fires. Someone was beating on a drum.

The dancing started when the sky was fully black. Standing with Keith, Russ watched a young woman circle the bonfire, stepping in rhythm with the drum, while a crowd clapped and chanted. Other young women joined her, and soon some of the older men were dancing, too. The pressure in Russ’s head had given way to exhilaration and gratitude. He was a white man alone among the Indians, hearing the women sing and chant. Resinous knots of juniper exploded in orange sparks, the stars dimming and brightening in swirling smoke, and he remembered to thank God.

One of the younger girls peeled off from the fire and came over to him. She touched his shirt sleeve. “Dance,” she said.

Alarmed, he turned to Keith.

“She wants you to dance.”

“Yes, I see that.”

“Dance with me,” the girl insisted.

She wore a bulky shawl and a skirt with a Mexican ruffle, but her calves were bare and slim. Her forwardness was so alien to Russ’s experience, she was like a threatening animal, and he didn’t know how to dance; it had been verboten in Lesser Hebron. He waited for her to go away, but she stood patiently, her eyes on the ground. She couldn’t have been older than sixteen, and he was a tall, white, older stranger. He found himself touched by her courage.

“I’m not a dancer,” he said, taking a step toward the fire, “but I can try.”

The girl smiled at the ground.

“You need to give her a little money,” Keith said.

This bewildered Russ. But the girl, too, seemed confused. Her smile, in the firelight, was edged with disappointment. Not wanting to offend her, he took a greenback from his wallet. She snatched it and hid it in her skirt.

He had no idea what to do, but he joined the circle and stepped as well as he could, following the girl, who did know what to do. The slimness of her legs and the shimmy of her hips brought out the queasiness in him. But now, in the flickering orange light, amid the beating of the drum and the chanting of female voices, he understood that the queasiness had nothing to do with pity or revulsion. It was heart-quickening excitement. Beneath the girl’s shawl and skirt was a body that a man could want; that Russ himself could want. A suspense that had hitherto existed only in disturbing dreams, dreams that ballooned into apocalyptic heat and ruptured in the soiling of his pajamas, had invaded the world he was awake in. What made the dreams so disturbing was how painless it was, how ecstatically pleasurable, to be consumed in flame.

The girl’s interest in him seemed to have expired when he gave her money. After a politely long interval, he stepped out of the circle and retreated into the dark. As soon as the girl noticed, she ran over to him. Her expression was now closer to angry.

“Keep dancing or give her money,” someone, not Keith, called to him.

He couldn’t imagine what money had to do with healing a soldier’s psychic wounds, but he fumbled with his wallet and gave her another greenback. Satisfied, she left him alone.

He awoke in the morning, on the ground beside Keith’s truck, still excited, still prickling with his new awareness, and daunted by the prospect of further immersion. Feeling the need for a walking cure, he told Keith he was going back to the ranch and would wait for him there.

“Take a horse,” Keith said. “You could die in the sun.”

“I’d rather walk.”

The walk was brutal, seven hours under a sun ever hotter and whiter. Keith had given him a skin of water and some bread wrapped in a rag, and he’d exhausted both before he reached the turnoff at the chapter house. By then, in the white heat, the road had ceased to be a line leading rationally from an origin to a destination. It had become, in his mind, the defining engenderer of everything that wasn’t road—stony slopes boiling with grasshoppers, stands of conifers made blacker by the blazing light, seemingly proximate rock formations whose respective positions his progress refused to alter. Either his ears or the air rang so loudly that he couldn’t hear his footsteps. He mistook a hovering falcon for an angel, and then he saw that the falcon was an angel, unaffiliated with the God he’d always known; that Christ had no dominion on the mesa.

By the time he reached the ranch, he’d walked his way out of all certainty, and the cure hadn’t worked. The very thing he’d been fleeing awaited him in Keith’s little house. The spirit of the girl he’d danced with had preceded him, outrun him, to the bedroom. Parched and sunburned though he was, he lay down and opened his pants to see if the dreamed apocalypse could be achieved while he was awake. He discovered that, with a bit of chafing, it very quickly could. The pleasure that tore through him was the more glorious for being waking, and there wasn’t any punishment; he wasn’t struck blind. He wasn’t even ashamed of the splatter. No one could see him, not even God. For the rest of his life, he associated the mesa with the discovery of secret pleasure and permission.

When Keith came back with his family, two days later, he put Russ to work on the ranch. To the farming skills Russ already had he added new ones. He learned how to lasso a calf, how to catch a horse on a range without fences, how to compel a cow to walk backward in a narrow gully. He experienced the misery of sheep dip for all concerned, both the sheep and anyone who touched the vile liquid. Keith’s brother-in-law castrated a stallion and threw a bloody testicle at Russ, and Russ threw it back at him. He and Keith rode far up the canyon and camped beneath a milky host of stars, saw the silent silhouettes of gliding owls, heard spirits whistling in rock crevices, ate roasted pinyon nuts. When his worst fear was realized, in the form of a scorpion sting on his ankle, he learned that it merely hurt like the dickens.

The longer he stayed with the Diné, the more resemblance he saw with his own community in Indiana. The Diné, too, preferred to live apart and seek harmony, and their women were like his mother—sturdy and patient, permitted to own land. In the stories kept alive by medicine men, the original divine mother, Changing Woman, who was named for her seasons, had partnered with the Sun and given birth to twin sons. Like Russ’s mother, Changing Woman was associated with the fruit of the land. She’d raised the sons and instilled them with practical wisdom, while the solar father, though necessary for creating life, remained aloof. And just as Mennonites recalled their martyrs, so the Diné sang of their Long Walk to the prison camp in the 1860s, the years of disease and hunger inflicted on them there. The Diné, too, defined themselves by persecution, and their country, close to nothing, welcoming to no one, a desert, was even godlier than Indiana. It was in the desert, after all, that the Israelites had received the Word of God, the one God of all mankind, and that Jesus, while summoning clarity for his ministry, had prayed for forty days and forty nights.

During Russ’s forty days in Diné Bikéyah, Keith advised him not to point at shooting stars, not to whistle at night, not to look a stranger in the eye, and not to ask a man his name before it was offered. When a Diné man died in his hogan, his family had to burn it and destroy whatever had touched him. Out on the open mesa, Keith nodded at a sun-bleached horse skeleton, still saddled a decade after the horse’s rider had been struck by lightning, and told Russ to stay away from it. Keith said the man’s bad luck adhered to the spot, and Russ, in the shimmering heat, the rarefied air, found that this made sense to him. While man experienced time as a progression, from unknown past to unknowable future, to God the entire course of history was eternally present. To God, the site of the lightning strike wasn’t just the spot where a man had died but the spot where he would later die and the spot where, in God’s perfect knowledge, he was forever dying. Being in the desert made a mystery like this accessible.

Because he was working hard, for people who could use the help, he didn’t feel guilty about his official mission, but George Ginchy had told him that if he wasn’t back by August he would send a search party. Accordingly, at first light on the thirty-first of July, he packed and fueled the Willys and took his leave of Keith and Stella, who were the only others awake. Stella ran up to him and wrapped her arms around his leg. He picked her up and stroked her head.

“I’ll come back,” he said. “I don’t know when, but I will.”

“Careful what you promise, Long Wrench.”

“I wasn’t talking to you. Was I, Stella?”

She squirmed bashfully. He set her down, and she went to her father. Ever unsentimental, Keith was already walking away.

Russ still knew hardly anything about the Diné, but at least he knew how much he didn’t know. The desert had only strengthened his belief in God, but he was no longer certain that his ancestral faith was the truest version of the one true faith. After he returned to the service camp, where Ginchy, not punitively, simply out of practicality, had found another worker to be his aide-de-camp, Russ began to investigate the many ways there were to skin a cat. He now worked for the quartermaster and could safely take an extra hour, on a Flagstaff supply run, to stop at the library and read books shelved in the Dewey decimal 290s, world religions. At the camp, on Sunday mornings, he tried worshiping with Ginchy and the Quakers. Their silences, though agreeable to him, seemed shallower than Navajo silences, less embedded in a comprehensive way of being. But he could never be a Navajo; their coffee wasn’t for him to drink.

One Sunday morning in November, continuing his investigation, he drove the old Willys to the Catholic church in Flagstaff. He’d detected, in a book about Saint Francis, an appealingly uncompromising spirit. From a pew at the rear of the church, amid the fragrance of burning tapers and the feeble light from colored windows, he could see the mantillas and gray braids of old Mexican women, the more modern American dress of middle-aged couples, and the pale nape of a woman whose head was deeply bowed. The priest, who was elderly, with a serious tremor, spoke a language as unintelligible as Navajo, and the service wasn’t short. Russ’s eyes kept returning to the pale neck in front of him. It aroused a sensation he’d formerly misapprehended as queasiness and now associated with pleasure in secrecy. The woman was small and delicate, her hair cut in a bob.

In Lesser Hebron, Communion was a major semiannual event taken in full fellowship, using bread that the women had communally kneaded and baked. Catholic Communion seemed almost as alien to Russ as a Navajo sing. The priest invited sacrilegious comparison to a doctor with a tongue depressor, the congregants to children queuing up for lunch. Only the woman with the pretty neck received her wafer with visible feeling. She kneeled with a quaking vulnerability, reminiscent of his mother’s intensity of faith. As she returned to her pew, he saw that she was full-mouthed and dark-eyed, possibly no older than he was.

After the service, he asked the priest if he could come again and receive Communion as a visitor. The priest explained why he couldn’t, but he said that Russ was welcome to observe and worship. Russ duly revisited Nativity the following Sunday, but this time he was defeated by the Latin of it all. The church’s thick walls, which a week earlier had felt sheltering, now struck him as a monument to a living faith gone dead, a once-molten spirit congealed into cold stone by the passing of centuries. The dark-eyed young woman was there again, alone again, but the fervor of her faith now seemed to exclude him.

Abandoning his experiment, he returned to worshiping with his fellow Mennonites in camp, but he felt no great fellowship with them. The truth was, he missed the mesa, the immanence of God in every rock, every bush, every insect. He took to hiking up the forest road, alone, on Sunday mornings. There he did sometimes sense God’s presence, but it was feeble, like sun hidden by winter clouds.

One afternoon in March, while he was at the library in Flagstaff, abusing his camp privileges, leafing through a book of photographs of Plains Indians, a young woman sat down across the table from him and opened a math textbook. She was wearing a plaid cowboy shirt and had her hair in a bandanna, but he still recognized her. In the library’s better light, she was easily the most handsome woman he’d seen since his eyes were opened by a Navajo dancer. Embarrassed to be looking at a picture book, as if he were illiterate, he stood up to fetch a different book.

“I know you,” she said. “I saw you at Nativity.”

He turned back. “Yes.”

“I only saw you twice. Why?”

“Do you mean why only twice, or why was I there at all?”

“Both.”

“I’m not Catholic. I was just—observing.”

“That explains it. Young Catholic gentlemen are few and far between. I notice you never came back.”

“I’m not Catholic.”

“So you just said. If you say it a third time, I’ll think you’re warding off some hex.”

Her sharpness surprised him, as did the directness with which she proceeded to question him. Having sensed a resemblance to his mother, he might have expected softness and modesty. While learning nothing more about her than her name, which was Marion, he told her where he came from, why he was in Flagstaff, and how the Navajos had led him to explore other faiths.

“So you just took a truck and disappeared for a month?”

“A month and a half. The camp director was very generous.”

“And you weren’t scared to go there by yourself?”

“I probably should have been more scared. Somehow it didn’t occur to me.”

“I would have been scared.”

“Well, you’re a woman.”

The noun was innocuous and everyday, but he blushed to have spoken it. He’d never engaged in conversation with a woman he consciously found attractive—wouldn’t have guessed how taxing it would be. That she seemed impressed with his story made it all the more taxing. He finally, awkwardly, said he ought to let her get on with her studying.

She regarded her textbook sadly. “The mind so drifts.”

“I know. I struggle with math myself.”

“It’s not a struggle, it’s just dry. I get hungry to be with God.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, as if God were a sandwich.

“I do, too,” Russ said. “That is—I know what you’re saying. I miss being with the Navajos. They get to be with God all day, every day.”

“You should come back to Nativity. You might find what you’re looking for. I didn’t even know I was looking till I went there.”

Another man might have been put off by her religiosity, but to Russ it was no more than a version of what he’d grown up with. Less placid, but familiar. It no longer disturbed him that a girl called his mother to mind. It had dawned on him that his mother wasn’t simply his mother, wasn’t merely a figure of sacred devotion. She was a flesh-and-blood woman who herself had once been young.

When he returned to the Catholic church, the next Sunday, Marion sat beside him and whispered brief explanations of the liturgy. He tried to connect to Christus, as the priest called him, but he was thwarted by the proximity of her little self. She wore a coat dyed bright green and collared with darker green velveteen. Some of her nails were chewed, the torn cuticles edged with dry blood. She knit her fingers together so tightly in prayer that her knuckles whitened, her breath faintly rasping from her open mouth. Because her passion was directed at the Almighty, Russ felt safe to be excited by it.

After the service, he offered her a lift in the Willys.

“Thanks,” she said, “but I have to walk.”

“I like walking, too. It’s my favorite thing.”

“I have to count the steps, though. I did it once, a couple of years ago, and now I can’t stop, because … Never mind.”

Two old, slow women had emerged from the church speaking Spanish. Cherry Avenue was so quiet that pigeons were camped out in the middle of it.

“What were you going to say?”

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s embarrassing. I have to start at the door of the church and make sure it’s the exact same number of steps every time, because that’s how I know God is still with me. If I ever counted one step too many, or too few…” She shuddered, perhaps at the thought, perhaps with embarrassment.

“My number of steps wouldn’t be the same,” Russ offered, although she hadn’t invited him to join her.

“That’s right, you’re tall. You’d have your own number—except you shouldn’t have a number. I shouldn’t have a number. I’m too superstitious already.”

“The Navajos have all sorts of superstitions. I’m not sure they’re wrong.”

“It’s an insult to God to think that counting steps has any bearing.”

“I don’t see the harm in it. The Bible is full of signs from God.”

She raised her dark eyes to him. “You’re a kind person.”

“Oh—thank you.”

“Maybe you can walk with me and distract me. I think, if I could walk even once without counting, I wouldn’t have to count anymore. Unless”—she laughed—“I get struck dead because I wasn’t counting.”

She was a mysterious combination of sharp and odd. The delicacy of her neck, visible above her velveteen collar, continued to fascinate him. In Lesser Hebron, and at Goshen, too, female napes had been concealed by plaits or tresses. As he walked her home, he learned that she’d grown up in San Francisco and had dreamed, foolishly, of being a Hollywood actress. She’d worked in Los Angeles as a typist and stenographer before moving to Flagstaff to live with her uncle. For a short while, she’d considered entering a convent, but now she was studying to be an elementary-school teacher. Being small, she said, she’d found that children trusted her, as if she were one of them. She said she hadn’t been raised Catholic—her father had been a nonobservant Jew, her mother a “Whiskeypalian.”

Each disclosure widened the vista of what Russ didn’t know about America. Although, by his calculation, she was only twenty-five, the place-names she dropped so casually, San Francisco, Los Angeles, were totemic of experiences more various than a woman from Lesser Hebron could expect in her entire life. As with Keith Durochie, he felt ignorant and inferior, and again the feeling was indistinguishable from attraction. It never crossed his mind that Marion might be attracted to him, too; that in her narrow Flagstaff ambit, with most of the country’s young men overseas, his apparition at Nativity had been as singular to her as hers was to him. Even if she hadn’t been significantly older, he had no concept of himself as an object of desire.

Her uncle’s house, on the outskirts of town, was low and ramshackle, its yard overrun with prickly pear. In the driveway stood a Ford truck blasted paintless by Arizona sand. Marion ran up to the front door and stamped on the mat there, spread her arms, and raised her face to the blue, blue sky. “Here I am,” she called to it. “Strike me dead.”

She looked at Russ and laughed. Trying to keep up, he managed a smile, but now she was frowning. Part of her oddness was how suddenly her expressions changed.

“I’m terrible,” she said. “This could turn out to be the moment when my fatal cancer started.”

“I don’t know that God minds a joke. Not if you sincerely love Him.”

Still serious, she came back down the walk. “Thank you for that. I do believe you’ve cured me. Would you like to stay for lunch?”

When he demurred—he was already derelict, owing to the length of Catholic mass, and he still had to retrieve the Willys—Marion insisted on walking back to the church with him. The taxation of being with her grew heavier as they retraced their steps. She admired his pacifism, admired his impatience at the camp, admired his compassion for the Navajos. Every time he glanced down, her brown eyes were glowing up at him. He’d never felt a gaze so unconditionally approving, and he lacked the experience to recognize the willingness it signaled. By the time they reached the truck, the stress of it had given him an actual headache. He offered to run her back to her uncle’s, but her face had clouded again.

“What you said earlier—that it doesn’t matter what we do as long as we love God. Do you really think that’s true?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “The Navajos don’t accept Christ, and I don’t know that they’re eternally damned. It doesn’t seem fair that they would be.”

She lowered her eyes. “I don’t believe in an afterlife.”

“You—really?”

“I think the only thing that matters is the state of your soul while you’re alive.”

“Is that—Catholic teaching?”

“Definitely not. Father Fergus and I discuss it all the time. To me, there’s nothing realer in the world than God, and Satan is no less real. Sin is real and God’s forgiveness is real. That’s the message of the Gospel. But there’s not much in the Gospel about the afterlife—John is the only one who talks about it. And doesn’t that seem strange? If the afterlife is so important? When the rich young man asks Jesus how he might have eternal life, Jesus doesn’t give him a straight answer. He seems to say that heaven is loving God and obeying the commandments, and hell is being lost in sin—forsaking God. Father Fergus says I have to believe that Jesus is talking about a literal heaven and hell, because that’s what the Church teaches. But I’ve read those verses a hundred times. The rich young man asks about eternity, and Jesus tells him to give away his money. He says what to do in the present—as if the present is where you find eternity—and I think that’s right. Eternity is a mystery to us, just like God is a mystery. It doesn’t have to mean rejoicing in heaven or burning in hell. It could be a timeless state of grace or bottomless despair. I think there’s eternity in every second we’re alive. So I’m in quite a bit of trouble with Father Fergus.”

Russ stared at the little green-coated woman. He might have just fallen in love with her. It wasn’t only the depth of her engagement with a question of urgency to him. It was hearing, in her words, a thought that had been latent in him without his being able to articulate it. His sense of inferiority became acute. Paradoxically, instead of making him shy of her, it made him want to bury himself in her.

“I should go inside and pray,” she said. “It stinks to feel so close to God and not be a better Catholic. My progress has been stymied for quite some time.”

“Can I come again next week?”

She smiled sadly. “If you don’t mind my saying, you’re not the most promising candidate, Mr. God Doesn’t Mind a Joke.”

“But you’re struggling with the creed yourself.”

“I have good reason to.”

“What—reason?”

“I’d frankly rather—do you think you’ll ever go back to the reservation?”

“Sometime, yes, absolutely.”

“Maybe you can take me along with you. I’d like to see it for myself.”

The thought of taking her to the mesa was like a reward in heaven, amazing but remote. For now, it felt more like a brush-off. “I’d be very happy to show it to you.”

“Good,” she said. “Something to look forward to.” She turned away and added, “You know where to find me.”

Did she mean that he could find her whenever he pleased, or only when he was returning to the reservation? As the words of Jesus were ambiguous, so were hers. He was still struggling to parse the ambiguity, two days later, when an envelope bearing only a Flagstaff postmark, no return address, arrived for him in camp. He took it to his cabin and sat down on his bunk.

Dear Russell,

I was remiss not to thank you again for curing me of my superstition. You were so lovely to put up with me—I felt as if the sun had come out after a month of clouds. I hope you find everything you’re looking for and more.

Yours in God and friendship,

Marion

Here, too, in the farewell flavor of I hope you find, a doubting mind could see ambiguity. But his body knew better. The sensation that gripped it was familiar in its emanation from his nether parts, entirely novel in its suffusion with emotion—with hope and gratitude, the image of one particular person, her soulful eyes, her complicated mind. It was inconceivable that a person so fascinating might feel lesser, and yet there it was, in her own handwriting, unambiguously: put up with me. The words excited him so much, she might have been whispering them in his ear.

The next day, when he requested leave for the afternoon, the quartermaster didn’t even ask what for. George Ginchy still enjoyed his roll calls and assemblies, but since the war ended the camp had only been going through the motions; Ginchy’s quest of the moment was to procure equipment for the football squad he’d organized. The old Willys was somehow still operable, and Russ drove it first to the public library and then, not finding Marion, to her uncle’s house, which he identified by its prickly pears. He was curiously unafraid to knock on the front door. He knew that the marriage of men and women was in the natural course of things, ordained by God, but in his mind, already, the world wasn’t full of women he might potentially someday meet, there was only one woman. In retrospect, their chance encounter at the library had had God’s seal on it. To knock on her door was no more than what God had intended when He created man and woman; which was to say that Russ was now conscious of being a man.

She came to the door in dungarees and an oversize white shirt, knotted at her midriff. That she was wearing pants, like a man, was inordinately incredible to him.

“I knew it would be you,” she said. “I woke up this morning with the strongest feeling I would see you.”

Her lack of surprise reminded him again of his mother, her serenity. If Marion’s presentiment could be credited, it suggested that Russ’s coming to see her, which had felt to him like an act of personal agency, had merely been part of God’s design. She led him through a parlor hung with landscape paintings, all similar in style, and into a kitchen with a view of a mountain. At the rear of the back yard, which was strewn with rusty metal forms, perhaps sculptures, stood a tin-roofed structure.

“That’s Jimmy’s studio,” Marion said. “He won’t come out till dinnertime. Antonio’s at work, and I am—studying.” She indicated an open textbook on the table. “We also have two cats, who seem to have disappeared. They were just here.”

Jimmy was her uncle, but Russ wondered about the other man. An unpleasant new feeling, possessiveness, came over him. “Who is Antonio?”

“Jimmy’s companion. They’re—you know.” Marion looked up. “Or maybe you don’t.”

How was he supposed to know anything?

“They’re like husband and wife, except Antonio’s a man. It’s a terrible abomination.” She snickered. “Are you hungry? I can make you a sandwich.”

There were, at camp, two Quaker boys whom Russ’s cabinmates referred to as fairies. Only now did he understand that the appellation might encompass more than just their manner. He felt a queasiness, not only at the abomination but at Marion’s snicker.

“I’m sorry,” she said, as if sensing his discomfort. “I forgot where you come from. I’m so used to Antonio, it seems ridiculous that anyone could disapprove.”

“So, you, uh—what part of Catholic teaching do you actually accept?”

“Oh, lots of it. The Eucharist, Christ’s absolution of our sins, Father Fergus’s authority. Jimmy and Antonio would definitely have things to repent if they were Catholic, but I don’t see that it’s any of my business. Jesus says I shouldn’t cast stones.”

Russ’s empathy for homosexuals began with Marion. Once he was in love with her, it became axiomatic that every conviction of hers deserved strong consideration for adoption. Alongside his craving to bury himself in her was a wish to be filled up with her—to feel his heart pumping her essence, as if he were a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, into his unfurling, birth-damp wings. She’d spent three and a half more years on earth than he, had lived in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and was a deeper and more incisive thinker. Because she swore by Roosevelt, Russ registered to vote as a Democrat. Because she read secular literature—Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, John Steinbeck—he read it, too. The same thing with jazz, the same thing with modern art, the same thing with clothes, and the same thing, especially, with sex.

They passed his first visit at her kitchen table, talking about the soul and teachers’ college, about his grandfather and his doubts about his family’s faith. On his second visit, five days later, they hiked so far up the mountain behind Jimmy’s house they had to race the setting sun back down. Marion then sent him a letter in which there was little of substance, just a breezy account of her day, but he couldn’t stop rereading it. Each detail—that one of the cats had coughed up a hair ball on her bed, that her uncle had asked her to cook lamb chops for his birthday, that she might stop at the butcher on her way back from the post office, that she thought it might snow again—was more magically interesting than the next. He remembered hungrily rereading his mother’s early letters to him, which were likewise full of the quotidian. Now his mother’s letters so bored him that he barely skimmed them once. He couldn’t have cared less if she thought it might snow.

His mother had taken to mentioning that one girl or another in their community had “really grown up,” a short phrase that encoded a longer message: he was to finish his service, choose a wife from one of a score of acceptable families, and settle down in Lesser Hebron. What he could write back to his mother without revealing his doubts had dwindled to the point of his repeating, essentially verbatim, not just sentences but whole paragraphs. Of his time with the Navajos, he’d written little more than that they were a proud and generous people who had great respect for the Mennonites. Of Marion, he wrote nothing at all. His sense that he and she had been ordained to meet was growing stronger by the day, and his family’s community didn’t forbid marriage to outsiders, merely discouraged it, but Marion was a pants-wearing, half-Jewish Catholic who lived with homosexuals. The safe course was to conceal her existence and hope for the best.

Every second Friday night, most of the camp workers piled into trucks and went down to the movie house in Flagstaff, chaperoned by George Ginchy himself. The first time Russ had joined them, after losing his religion on the mesa, he’d been transfixed by the window movies opened on the larger world, and he’d been going ever since. On a Friday night in April, when he and the others trooped into the Orpheum, a small, green-coated figure was waiting for him, by secret prearrangement, in the last row of seats.

Very soon, almost as soon as the lights went down, four soft fingers slipped into his callused hand. To hold a woman’s hand was so absorbing and momentous that the shouts of the Three Stooges, in the first short subject, were unintelligible to him. While Marion, for her part, seemed perfectly at ease, laughing at the twisting of ears and the collapse of a stepladder, the spectacle of violence struck Russ as a profanement of his moment with her; it hurt his eyes.

When the feature started, a Sherlock Holmes picture, she lost interest in the screen and rested her head against his shoulder. She extended an arm across his chest, pulling herself closer. Basil Rathbone, meerschaum in hand, was speaking unintelligibly. Russ tried not to breathe, lest she let go of him, but she stirred again. Her hand was on his neck, turning his face toward hers. In the flickering light, a pair of lips surfaced. And, oh, their softness. The intimacy of kissing them was so intense it made him anxious, like a mortal in the presence of eternity. He turned his face away, but she immediately drew it back. By and by, he got the idea. He and she weren’t there to watch the movie, not one bit. They were there to kiss and kiss and kiss.

When the credits rolled, she wordlessly stood and left the theater. The house lights came up on a world comprehensively transformed, made more vivid and expansive, by the joining of two mouths. Feeling wildly conspicuous, hoping he wasn’t, he slipped into a group of workers exiting the theater. Marion wasn’t in the lobby, but George Ginchy was.

“You never cease to surprise me,” Ginchy said.

“Sir?”

“I took you for a God-fearing country boy. You almost squeaked with clean living.”

“Am I in trouble?”

“Not with me.”

Marion led him, in the weeks that followed, up a long and twisting stairway, scary to climb but delightful to linger on each step of—the first I love you in a letter, the first I love you spoken, the first kiss in public daylight, the hours shortened to minutes by kissing in her uncle’s parlor, the more frenzied nighttime grappling on the seat of the Willys, the unbelievable opening of her blouse, the discovery that even infinite softness had gradations, softer yet, softest of all—which finally led, on a cloudy afternoon in May, to her locking her bedroom door, kicking off her shoes, and lying down on her little bed.

Through the sheer curtain on her window, Russ could see her uncle’s art studio.

“Should we be in here?” he said. “It would be awkward if someone…”

“Antonio’s in Phoenix, and Jimmy’s not my keeper. It’s not as if we have a better place.”

“It could be awkward, though.”

“Are you afraid of me, sweetie? You seem afraid of me.”

“No. I’m not afraid of you. But—”

“I woke up knowing today would be the day. You just have to trust me. I’m scared, too, but—I really think God intended this to be the day.”

It seemed to Russ that God was in the cloudy light outside but not inside her bedroom. Somewhere on the stairway to this moment, he’d lost hold of the importance of preserving his purity until they were married.

“Today’s good for other reasons, too,” she said. “It’s a good safe day.”

“Is Jimmy not home?”

“No, he’s in his studio. I mean I can’t get pregnant.”

He didn’t love feeling always slow, always behind, but he did love Marion. It wasn’t accurate to say he thought about her night and day, because it was less a matter of thinking than of feeling filled with her, filled in the unceasing way that he imagined a more truly religious person, a Navajo on the mesa, might be filled with God. And she was right: if not today, in her room, then when and where? He never wanted to stop touching her, but merely touching was never enough. His body had been telling him, albeit mutely, and yet so insistently that he got the message, that the pressure of her presence in him could only be relieved by releasing it inside her.

Which he now did. In the gray light, on the quilted coverlet of her bed. The release came very quickly and was disappointing in its suddenness, surprisingly less satisfactory than his solitary chafings. An act no less crucial in his life than being baptized had lasted scarcely longer. Ashamed of how unmomentous the act had felt in the event, he became more generally ashamed. His proportions were as ungainly as hers were ideal, his boniness an affront to her softness, his skin a dismal gray against the creamy white of hers. He couldn’t believe she was smiling up at him, couldn’t believe the approval in her gaze.

“Just rest there for a second,” she said, stroking his hair. “We’re only starting.”

He didn’t know how she knew this, but again she was right. As soon as she said starting, his body told him she was right. The word in itself reelectrified it. That the crucial act could be repeated, after the shortest of breathers, would never have occurred to him. That it could be done four times, before the light faded and he had to rush away, was a dazzlement from which, he could already feel, as he urged the Willys up the steep road to camp, there would be no recovering. The Mosaic commandment against adultery, the plain dress of the women in Lesser Hebron, the proscription against dancing, the concealment of women’s necks: it was as if he’d grown up inside an ancient fort whose parapets and cannons faced out on peaceful fields, toward an enemy he’d seen no trace of. Now he understood why the fortifications were so massive.

The next time they sinned, in her little room, on an unusually warm and muggy afternoon, with a cat thumping against her locked door, he fell from a height of carnality into an abyss of moral anxiety. He trusted Marion because of her unfeignable love of God, her self-blaming goodness. What she wanted was no more than what he wanted, and the spilling of seed wasn’t shameful per se. An arousal and emission that occurred in dreams, without his volition, could only be a natural function of the body. But to release his seed inside a woman he wasn’t married to, to lose himself in her flesh, to wallow in her private aromas, was manifestly different. He extricated himself and, despite the heat, pulled the coverlet over him.

“Aren’t you worried,” he said, “about committing a mortal sin?”

She scrambled to her knees. Her nakedness, blinding in its beauty, seemed of no consequence to her.

“I don’t need to be a Catholic,” she said. “I want to be whatever you are. If you want to be Navajo, I’ll be a Navajo with you.”

“That’s not a possibility.”

“Then whatever you like. I needed to be at Nativity because—it was something I needed to do. I needed to pray and be forgiven. I prayed and prayed, and then there you were—my reward. Am I allowed to say that? You’re like my gift from God. That’s how miraculous you are to me.”

“But then … don’t you think we should be married?”

“Yes! Good idea! We can do it next week. Or tomorrow—how about tomorrow?”

As if the blessing of matrimony had already descended, he pulled her onto him and kissed her. She threw aside the quilt and straddled him, handling him with an expertness he didn’t question; she was naturally expert at everything. Only in her whimpers, which she emitted in rhythm to their coupling, was any sense of lesserness detectable. She whimpered and spoke his name, whimpered and spoke his name. In his mind, she was already his darling little wife. But after the culminating pleasure had coursed through him, he returned to being a sinner in a sweat beneath another sinner.

Her mood, too, had changed. She was crying, voicelessly, miserably.

“Is something wrong? Did I hurt you?”

She shook her head.

“Marion, I’m sorry, my God—did I hurt you?”

“No.” She gasped through her tears. “You’re wonderful. You’re my—you’re perfect.”

“Then what? What is it?”

She rolled away and covered her face with her hands. “I can’t be a Catholic.”

“Why not?”

“Because it means I can’t marry you. I was—oh, Russ.” She sobbed. “I was already married!”

A sickening disclosure. Jealousy and uncleanliness, both bodily and moral, were compounded in the image of another man possessing her as he just had. A woman he’d believed to be pure and purehearted was previously used—befouled. He felt sick with disappointment. The depth of it revealed the height of the hope she’d given him.

“It happened in Los Angeles,” she said. “I was married for six months and then divorced. I should have told you right away. It was terrible of me not to. You’re so beautiful and I’m—oh—I’m so—I should have told you! Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

She thrashed in her misery. A cruel part of him thought she deserved any amount of emotional punishment, but the loving part of him was moved. He wanted to kill the man who’d polluted her.

“Who was it? Did he hurt you?”

“It was just a mistake. I was still a kid—I didn’t know anything. I thought I was supposed to—I didn’t know anything.”

The idea of an innocent girl’s mistake, for which she was now piteously remorseful, further softened his heart. But his anger and disgust had a life of their own. He’d thrown away his virginity on a woman who’d given hers to someone else, and now her nakedness was repellent, her smell appalling. He wished to God he’d never left Lesser Hebron. He swung his legs off the bed and roughly dressed himself.

“Please don’t be angry with me,” she said in a calmer voice.

He was too angry to speak.

“I made a mistake. I made lots of mistakes, but I’m not wrong about us. Please try, if you can, to forgive me. I want to marry you, Russ. I want to be yours forever.”

He’d wanted the very same thing. Disappointment welled up in him and erupted in a sob.

“Sweetie, please,” she said. “Sit down with me, let me hold you. I’m so very, very sorry.”

He stood shaking and crying, torn between disgust and need. The self-pity in his tears was new to him—it was as if he’d never appreciated, until this moment, that he, too, was a person, a person he was always with, a person he might love and pity the way he loved God or pitied other people. Feeling compassion for this person, who was suffering and needed his care, he unlocked the bedroom door and ran out through the house, jumped into the Willys and drove a few blocks. He stopped beneath a cypress tree and wept for himself.

She sent him two letters, on consecutive days, and he opened neither of them. The woman he loved was still there but occluded from him, separated by her own doing. It was as if his Marion were imprisoned in a Marion he didn’t know at all. He could almost hear his dear one crying out to him from inside the prison. She needed him to come and rescue her, but he was afraid of the other Marion—afraid of finding that it was she who’d written the letters.

He’d done very little praying since he met her. Returning to it now, he laid his situation out to God and asked Him what His will was. The first insight to emerge was that God required him to forgive her. In trying to explain to God why he was angry, he saw that Marion’s offense—she’d been too embarrassed to mention her marriage sooner—was paltry; that, indeed, the greater offense was his own hard-heartedness. This led him to a second insight: for all his doubting, for all his liberation, he was still a Mennonite. At some level, he’d assumed that he would one day bring Marion home with him and there, although they might not settle in Lesser Hebron, receive his family’s blessing. Now the fact of her divorce had snuffed any chance of that. The extremity of his disappointment pertained not to her but to his parents, because he hadn’t yet fully broken with them. He was angry because her divorce compelled him to make a hard choice.

Unready to make it, still afraid to open her letters, he wrote to the only person who might understand his quandary. His grandfather must have replied to Russ’s letter immediately, because the reply arrived in camp just eight days later. The advice in it was unexpected.

You don’t have to marry her—I’m here to tell you the sun will still rise in the morning. Why not enjoy the moment and see how you feel when your term of service ends? You’ll have plenty of time for marrying if you still feel the same, but a young man doesn’t always know his heart. Your gal already made her own mistake, and it sounds like she knows how to look after herself. That’s pure gold—yours to enjoy if you’re careful. So long as she’s not in a family way, there’s no reason to be hasty.

A year earlier, Russ might have been alarmed by how tumorously his grandfather’s debauchery had consumed his moral principles. Now, instead, he felt a fraternity. It seemed to him that Clement was right in every respect but one—Russ already knew his heart, and it belonged to Marion. But there was more.

As to your parents, I don’t guess they’ll forgive you if you marry her. Your father doesn’t look to our Savior but to what other men think of him. He preaches love but holds a grudge like no man’s business. I know firsthand the vengeance in his heart. Your mother’s a good woman, but she lost her mind to Jesus. She’s so deep in her faith you can scream at the top of the lungs and she won’t hear you. She thinks she loves you when she prays for you, but she only loves her Jesus.

Russ didn’t need to reread Clement’s letter, then or ever. One reading was enough to burn every line of it into his memory.

What the Bible meant by joy, and by the related words that recurred in it so frequently, joyful, joyous, rejoicing, he learned the following afternoon, when he went back to Marion’s uncle’s house. There was joy in his unconditional surrender to her—joy in his apology for the hardness of his heart, joy in her forgiveness, joy in his release from doubt and blame. How many times had he read the word joy without having experienced what it meant? There was joy in making love on a thunderstormy afternoon, and there was joy in not making love, joy in just lying and looking into her fathomless dark eyes. Joy in the first trip they made together to Diné Bikéyah, joy in the sight of Stella on Marion’s lap, joy in the sweetness of Marion’s way with children, joy in the thought of giving her a child of her own, joy in the desert sunset, joy in the star-choked sky, joy even in the mutton stew. And joy in George Ginchy’s invitation to a private dinner with him, joy in seeing her through Ginchy’s eyes. Joy when she first put her mouth on Russ’s penis, joy in her wantonness, joy in the abjectness of his gratitude, joy in its sealing of the certainty that he would never leave her. Joy in the corroborating pain of being apart from her, joy in their reunions, joy in making plans, joy in the prospect of finishing his education and catching up with her, joy in the mystery of what might happen after that.

The joy lasted until they were married, on the day his term of service ended, with George and Jimmy as their witnesses, at the courthouse in Flagstaff. They’d abandoned their respective religions and were seeking a new faith to share, but their slate was still clean and they didn’t have a church to marry in. Russ felt obliged to write to his parents the very same day, and he didn’t sugarcoat what he’d done. He explained that Marion had been previously married and that he had no interest in rejoining the community, but that he would like to bring his wife to Lesser Hebron and introduce her to the family.

His father’s reply was brief and bitter. It grieved him but didn’t entirely surprise him, he said, that Russ had been infected by a pestilence stemming from elsewhere in the family, and neither he nor Russ’s mother had any wish to meet Marion. Russ’s mother’s reply was longer and more anguished, more a descant on her own failures, but the point was the same: she’d lost her son. Not rejected him (as Marion, ever defensive of Russ, was quick to point out) but lost him.

The rejection confirmed the rightness of his choice—shame and blame on anyone who refused to meet the most wonderful woman in the world—and he adored being wedded to Marion, adored having her always at his side, on his side. And yet, in his innermost heart, a shadow fell when his parents disowned him. The shadow wasn’t quite doubt and it wasn’t quite guilt. It was more a sense of what he’d lost in gaining Marion. He no longer belonged in Lesser Hebron, but he was still haunted by it. He found himself missing his mother’s little farm, his grandfather’s shop, the eternity in the sameness of the days there, the rightness of a community radically organized around the Word. He understood that his father was a deeply flawed person, his stringency a compensation for an underlying weakness, and that his mother had indeed, in a way, lost her mind. But he couldn’t help secretly admiring them. Their faith had an edge that his own never would.

When he accepted a rural ministry in Indiana, four years later, he hoped he might regain a bit of what he’d lost. He was certainly glad to see more of his grandfather, who, in spite of himself, had married Estelle and now lived in her hometown, two hours to the north of Russ. But the sense of loss was spiritual, not geographical. It was portable and its name was Marion. As his reliance on her became routine, her capabilities merely useful to him, their lovemaking duly procreative, his misgivings about her first marriage returned in the form of grievance. He began to wonder why he’d been so determined to ignore Clement’s advice and marry the first woman he’d loved.

On his bad days, he saw a rube from Indiana who’d been pounced on by an older city girl—snared by the sexual cunning of a woman who’d developed it with a different man. On his worst days, he suspected that Marion had known very well that he could have done better. She must have known that as soon as he left the little world of Flagstaff he would encounter women younger than he was, taller than Marion, less odd, more awed by his own capabilities, and not previously married. She’d seduced him into a contract before he knew his value in the marketplace.

And still, even then, he might have made peace with having married her, if only she, too, had been a virgin when he met her. His grievance was no less gnawing for being trivial and godless. In the final, hard form it had taken, after his dream about Sally Perkins had opened his eyes to the multitude of desirable women, the grievance was that Marion had gotten to enjoy sex with a second person, he only with her. He could tolerate her superiority in every other regard, but not in this one.

Boarding the bus in New Prospect, he’d been unhappy to find Frances sitting with the other parent adviser, Ted Jernigan, in the seats behind the driver. Ted was a threat—every other man was a threat—but Russ had learned his lesson: it was better to withhold than to pester. Better to ensconce himself with the kids in back, bat around a Nerf ball, sing along with songs whose words he now mostly knew, take instruction in the playing of an E chord and a D chord, compete in an endless license-plate game, and let Frances feel left out. His acceptance by the cool kids, a result of his more laissez-faire approach to Crossroads, was such a gratifying contrast to his previous Arizona trip, he almost could have done without the complication of her.

Now they’d entered the Navajo Nation. Along the highway, in evening sunlight, were children hawking juniper-berry necklaces, billboards advertising HAND WOVEN BLANKETS and TURQUOISE JEWELRY, a souvenir shop overflowing with generic kitsch, behind it an AUTHENTIC NAVAJO HOGAN, a wooden Plains Indian in full headdress, and an enormous tepee. The last of the five guitars on the bus had gone quiet. Carolyn Polley, across the aisle from Russ, was reading Carlos Castaneda. Kim Perkins was teaching the cat’s cradle to David Goya, other girls were playing Spades, other boys openly hooting over a pornographic comic book that Keith Stratton had bought at a truck stop in Tucumcari. Russ could have confiscated it, with some words about its demeaning of women, but he was tired and the kids in his group were all basically harmless. Roger Hangartner had smoked pot on a Crossroads retreat the year before, Darcie Mandell needed to be watched for her diabetes, Alice Raymond was grieving the recent death of her mother, and Gerri Kohl was an irritating trumpeter of hackneyed phrases (“Feeding time at the zoo” “Velly stlange”), but there weren’t any real problem kids—Perry was on Kevin Anderson’s bus. In Tucumcari, when Russ asked Kevin how Perry was doing, Kevin had said he was overexcited, had talked nonstop all night, and didn’t feel like leaving the bus. Russ could have boarded it and spoken to Perry, but Perry was Kevin’s problem now, not his.

When the Many Farms water tower appeared on the horizon, he ventured forward and made Ted Jernigan trade places with him. Taking the Ted-warmed seat, he asked Frances if she’d gotten any sleep.

She leaned away from him and gave him a cold look. “You mean, between hearing how Ted would have handled the Viet Cong and how much I overpaid for my house?”

Russ laughed. He couldn’t have been happier. “I kept waiting for you to come and join us.”

“One of us knows every single person on this bus. The other one doesn’t know anyone.”

He lost his smile. “Sorry.”

“When you told me you could be a jerk, I didn’t believe you.”

“Very sorry.”

She turned to her window and didn’t look at him again.

The sun had dropped behind the Black Mesa, beginning the long dusk in Many Farms, the somber illumination of its overwide roads, its identical BIA-sponsored houses, its utilitarian school buildings and dusty warehouses. Russ directed the driver to the council office and hopped out while the other two buses pulled up behind him. The air had a wintry bite, a thinness that his heart immediately registered. As he approached the office door, a sturdy young woman in a red wool jacket came out. “You must be Russ.”

“Yes. Wanda?”

“Russ, if I may say so, we were expecting you earlier.” In person, too, her voice was plangent. “I would like to discuss your plan with you.”

“The, ah—mandate?”

Wanda’s emphatic nodding matched her voice. “We have the mandate and you can help us. However, because you prefer to stay in Many Farms, we are willing to accommodate a second group here. I have spoken to the director and he is okay with it.”

“What is the mandate?”

“To conform with the mandate, we need handicapped access ramps at Kitsillie. A ramp for the front and a ramp for the fire exit. The toilet also must be handicapped-accessible. But may I be completely open and honest with you? I feel you would be more comfortable in Many Farms.”

Over the idling of three buses came the crunch of boots on gravel, the growling voice of Ambrose, a murmur from Kevin Anderson. If Russ’s group stayed in Many Farms, he would have to be with Perry, and Frances with Larry. Quickly, before Ambrose could interfere, he told Wanda that he’d rather stick to the original plan. Her emphatic nod said one thing, her troubled expression another.

“You may go to Kitsillie,” she said, “but I would ask you, in all respect, to stay close to the school. No one should walk alone, and no one should be outside after dark.”

“That’s fine. We’ve had the same rule in the past.”

She stepped away to greet Ambrose and Kevin. Not for the first time, Russ was impressed by Ambrose’s way of forging a connection with a stranger, the compassionate scowl with which he conveyed that she was being seen as a person, taken seriously. Scowling as if nothing on earth mattered more to him, he asked Wanda how Keith Durochie was. It should have been Russ who’d asked the question.

“Keith is not good,” Wanda said, “but he is resting comfortably at home.”

“How bad is it?” Russ said.

“He is resting comfortably but I am told that he is very weak.”

Into Russ’s throat came the sadness of life’s brevity, the sadness of the sunless hour, the sadness of Easter. God was telling him very clearly what to do. He had to stay in Many Farms, where Keith had lived since 1960, so he could visit Keith and keep an eye on Perry. In light of Keith’s condition, his wish to enjoy sex with a person not Marion seemed even more trivial, and he’d been insane to imagine it happening in Arizona. He’d let himself forget how bleak the reservation was in late winter, how demanding it was to lead a work camp.

And yet, when he thought of doing God’s will, at the cost of his week with Frances on the mesa, he felt unbearably sorry for himself. It was strange that self-pity wasn’t on the list of deadly sins; none was deadlier.

The swing driver, a gaunt lung-cancer candidate named Ollie, had taken over the wheel of the Kitsillie bus. From the seat beside Frances, Russ directed him to Rough Rock and from there up the side of the mesa. The road was stony and narrow, and there was still enough light to see how close to the edge of it they were, how fatal a plunge would be. At a particularly harrowing bend, Frances gasped and said, “Oh Jesus, Jesus.” She clutched Russ’s hand, and, just like that, he was holding hers. She’d said it herself: jerks turned her on. Behind the bus, a horn began to honk.

“Yeah, where am I supposed to go?” Ollie said.

The honking persisted until they reached a straightaway. Ollie pulled over, inches from the edge of a chasm, and a pickup truck, still honking, gunned past them. One of its bumper stickers said CUSTER HAD IT COMING. Its driver stuck out his arm and gave the bus the middle finger.

“Charming,” Frances said.

“Are you okay?”

She let go of Russ’s hand. “I’m waiting to hear there’s a better road back down.”

As if from a different world, the gentler world of New Prospect, Biff Allard’s bongo drums started up, joined by one guitar and then another, and then by Biff’s reedy voice.

Bus driver Ollie, bus driver Ollie

Rollin’ through the hills, movin’ down the valley

Some folks like to drink, some folks like to cuss

Ollie gets high on a TWELVE-TON BUS

A cheer went up, and Ollie waved his thanks. He didn’t know that Biff had written the song for the earlier driver, Bill.

Up on the mesa, as the sky darkened, the moon highlighted patches of snow on the north-facing slopes. Russ struggled to integrate his memories of the mesa and the sadness of Keith with the new possibility embodied in the woman next to him. He felt warmed not only by her shoulder but by the triumph of having brought her, after so many complications, to a place that had formed him. He wondered if she could love the place herself—love him—and if he might yet grow old with her. Though the road had leveled out, he put his hand on hers again. She gave it a squeeze and didn’t let go until he stood up to address the group.

“Okay, listen up,” he said. “We’re going straight to the chapter house and see if we can get some dinner. I don’t want to hear any complaining about the food. You hear me? We’ll see a lot of mutton stew and frybread—if you don’t like it, you’ll eat it anyway. We need to remember, at all times, that we are guests of the Navajo Nation. Our attitude is gratitude. We come with our privilege, come with all our nice things, and we need to remember how we look to the Navajos. Do not ever leave your things unattended, except where we’ll be sleeping. Do not ever leave the school area by yourself. Are we clear on that? I want to see groups of four people or more, and no one ever leaves the school after dark. Understood?”

There was no electricity or telephone at Kitsillie—except for the chapter house and the school building, still unfinished after five years of work, there wasn’t much of anything—but, Wanda be praised, Daisy Benally and her sister were waiting for the bus. Daisy, an aunt of Keith’s by marriage, hadn’t been young when Russ met her in 1945; now she was stooped and shrunken. Her sister, Ruth, was nearly as fat as the average Hopi. The two of them had made a vat of stew in the chapter-house kitchen, which smelled of hot oil, and they now proceeded, by lantern light, while the Crossroads group settled into the common room, to cook the frybread. The room’s chill pervaded the concrete floor, the dented metal folding chairs, the particle-board tables. Russ asked Frances what she was thinking.

“I’m thinking, yikes. You told me it was primitive, but.”

“It’s not too late to go to Many Farms. Ollie can take you back.”

She bristled. “Is that how you think of me? The lady who can’t hack it?”

“Not at all.”

“I wouldn’t mind finding a bathroom, though.”

“Brace yourself.”

As he weighed whether to sit with Alice Raymond—whether it would make her self-conscious about her mother’s death, and whether his concern about making her self-conscious concealed a craven fear of her bereavement—he thought of Ambrose, whose instincts with teenagers were unerring. He was relieved when Carolyn Polley sat down with Alice. He didn’t have to be good at everything, he only had to be good at getting Frances. He ate his dinner with her and Ted Jernigan.

“Not to complain,” Ted said, “but there’s something not right about the bread.”

“The oil’s a little rancid, maybe. It’s only a taste—it won’t hurt you.”

“Where is the mutton?” Frances said, poking at her bowl. “All I have is turnips and potatoes.”

“You can ask Daisy for some meat.”

“I’m dreaming of the beer nuts in my suitcase.”

Outside the chapter house, a truck banged by in a roar of downshift. Russ didn’t give it a thought until he’d finished his dinner and stepped outside. The temperature had plunged but Ollie was in shirtsleeves, smoking a cigarette and looking up the rough road to the school building. A hundred yards up, a pickup truck’s headlights were aimed down at the bus. The sound of its engine was distinct in the still, cold air. Wanda had promised to come up and check on the group, but Russ didn’t think the truck was Wanda’s. Hoping there might be some other benign explanation, a lost calf, a relative fetching Daisy and Ruth, he rounded up the group and got everyone on the bus.

In its headlights, as Ollie steered it up the road, Russ recognized the pickup from their encounter with it earlier. Ollie slowed down and tapped the horn, but the truck didn’t move. There was menace in its headlights. Frances again clutched Russ’s hand.

“Stay here,” he said.

As he got out and approached the truck, its doors opened and four figures jumped out. Four young men, three of them in hats. The fourth, in a jean jacket, his hair loose on his shoulders, stepped forward and looked directly, insolently, into Russ’s eyes. “Hey, white man.”

“Hello. Good evening.”

“What are you doing up here?”

“We are a Christian youth fellowship. We’re here to perform a week of service.”

The man, seeming amused, looked back at his companions. Something in his manner reminded Russ of Laura Dobrinsky. The younger Navajos don’t like you, either.

“Would you mind letting us through?”

“What are you doing here?”

“In Kitsillie? We will be working to finish the school building.”

“We don’t need you for that.”

Anger rose in Russ. He had an angry white thought—that, year after year, the tribe itself did little to finish the school—but he didn’t speak it. “We are here at the tribal council’s invitation. They’ve given us a job, and I intend to do it.”

The man laughed. “Fuck the council. They might as well be white.”

“The council is an elected body. If you have a problem with our being here, you can take it up with them. I have a busload of very tired kids who, if you wouldn’t mind, need to sleep.”

“Where you from?”

“We’re from Chicago.”

“Go back to Chicago.”

Russ’s blood rose further. “For your information,” he said, “I am not just another bilagáana. I’ve been a friend of the reservation for twenty-seven years. I’ve known Daisy Benally since 1945. Keith Durochie is an old friend of mine.”

“Fuck Keith Durochie.”

Russ took an anger-managing breath. “What exactly is your grievance?”

“Fuck Keith Durochie. That’s my grievance. Get the fuck out of here—that’s my grievance.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but this is council land, and we have an invitation to be here. We will stay at the school and be gone in a week.”

“You people are polluters. You can pollute Chicago, but this isn’t Chicago. I don’t want to see you here tomorrow.”

“Then you’ll just have to look the other way. We’re not leaving.”

The man spat on the ground, not directly at Russ, but close. “You had your warning.”

“Is that a threat?”

The man turned away and walked toward his companions.

“Hey, hey,” Russ shouted, “are you threatening me?”

Again, over the shoulder, the middle finger.

Russ hadn’t been so angry since he fought with Marion at Christmas. He stalked past the bus, back down to the chapter house, and found Daisy stooped in the light of a lantern, her expression unreadable. As the truck screamed past them, he asked her who the young man was.

“Clyde,” she said. “He has an angry spirit.”

“Do you know what his problem with Keith is?”

“He’s angry at Keith.”

“I can see that. But why?”

Daisy smiled at the ground. “It’s not our business.”

“Do you think it’s safe for us to be here?”

“Stay close to the school.”

“But do you think we’ll be safe?”

“Stay close to the school. We’ll have breakfast for you in the morning.”

The sensible thing to do was to concede defeat and retreat to Many Farms, but Russ’s blood was raging with testosterone. He felt wronged and misunderstood, and the progress he’d made with Frances had elevated his hormone levels. When he returned to the bus and saw the worry and the admiration in her face, the hormones urged him to stand his ground.

The following day, Palm Sunday, passed without a sign of Clyde. Russ established a perimeter comprising the table of land on which the school was set, a lower yard with a netless basketball hoop, and the arroyo behind it. Sunday was a rest day, and it was hard on the kids to be surrounded by interesting country and not be allowed to explore it, but they had their relationships and their suntans to work on, their books and their playing cards, their guitars. Russ was grateful to see Carolyn Polley, who was going to be a fine Christian minister, introducing Frances to the various girls. He was struck, as he’d been when he first took Frances to Theo Crenshaw’s church, by her hesitancy in an unfamiliar setting, and again it moved him.

Ted Jernigan had a problem with the mandate. While Russ and the other alumni adviser, Craig Dilkes, were inventorying the ramp-building supplies, which had been dumped in an otherwise empty classroom, Ted remarked that the money might better have been spent on central heating.

“Government money comes with mandates,” Russ said.

“And I’m saying it’s an idiotic mandate.”

Testosterone stirred in Russ. “I’ll remind you,” he said, “that we’re mainly here for ourselves. The point is personal growth, individually and as a group. If the Navajos want handicapped ramps, that’s good enough for me.”

“How does a kid in a wheelchair get up that road? How does he get across the ditch? Are they planning on landing him in a helicopter?”

“You can lead the bookcase-building crew. Would that meet your high standard of utility?”

The sarcasm drew a frown from Ted. “I don’t get you.”

“What don’t you get?”

“That was quite the welcoming committee last night. We might as well be under siege—I don’t get why you’re so hell-bent on staying.”

“I just explained the point of it.”

“But a place where the kids can’t even take a shower? When we’re obviously not wanted?”

“If you don’t like it here, I can find you a ride back to Many Farms.”

“You’re telling me you don’t think this is dangerous.”

“Kitsillie can be rough,” Craig Dilkes interposed. He’d been a sophomore on the fellowship’s first trip to Arizona. “It’s the roughness that really pulls the group together—people taking care of each other.”

“Maybe,” Ted said. “Provided no one gets hurt. If someone gets hurt, in a place we should know better than to be, the buck stops with the leader.”

He left the room, and Craig raised his eyebrows. They were blonder than his mop of red hair. “I’m not liking the vibe here.”

With Craig, Russ could be honest. “I agree,” he said. “Keith warned me about it.”

“There’s that, but I meant Ted.”

In the evening, the group gathered around a single flame in their dark room. The “candle” began with the singing of two songs and the giving of what Ambrose called strokes—a stroke to someone for having a great sense of humor, a stroke for trading potatoes for nasty turnips, a stroke for taking a risk in a new relationship, a stroke for being smart, a stroke for letting go of being smart and speaking from the heart, a stroke for sharing a candy bar, a stroke for teaching someone how to tie a bandanna. Frances herself spoke up and stroked the group for welcoming a middle-aged housewife. Kim Perkins, whom Russ had so far left alone, owing to his troubles with her sister, surprised him with a stroke for his courage in handling the four angry Navajos. His heart swelled with the contrast to the last Arizona candle he’d led. Here, unpoisoned by Laura Dobrinsky and Sally Perkins, were forty good kids in thick socks and thermal underwear, with sleeping bags draped over their shoulders, and his beloved boy-haired woman on the far side of the circle, holding the hands of two girls she’d only just met. How much better his life was now! How nearly joyful again!

And then Ted Jernigan raised the issue of security. “I don’t know about the rest of you,” he said, “but I don’t enjoy feeling threatened every time I step out for a meal. Do you mind if we have a show of hands? Does anyone else think we’d be better off closer to civilization?”

The memory of Russ’s expulsion three years earlier, the traumatic call for a show of hands, triggered a fight-or-flight response in him.

“Ted,” he said hormonally, “if you have an issue with my leadership, you should direct it to me personally.”

“I already did that,” Ted said. “What I’m looking for now is a sense of the group. Is anyone else thinking what I’m thinking?”

He raised his hand and looked around the circle. Russ glanced at Frances and found her smiling at him, perhaps conveying her opinion of Ted, her hand unraised. Among the kids, only Gerri Kohl, she of “velly stlange,” raised a hand. Russ, sensing victory, was all over it.

“Gerri, thank you for your honesty,” he said, sounding like Ambrose. “That is a brave thing to admit. That took real guts.”

Gerri lowered her hand. “It’s just one vote,” she said. “I can go with the flow.”

Though Russ felt bad for her, knowing she wasn’t well liked, her unpopularity was an advantage to be pressed. “Ted is right,” he said. “The energy up here is somewhat negative. I intend to find out why and see what we can do to repair it. But if anyone else feels the same way Gerri does, now is the time to say so. If you’d rather go back to Many Farms, we can still be together as a group there.”

“Is there hot water in Many Farms?” a girl asked.

The discussion devolved into bitching and laughter at the bitching, followed by a final song and a closing prayer, which Russ handed off to Carolyn Polley. He blew out the candle, relit the Coleman lanterns, and checked the kerosene heater. There was a rush for the bathroom, which he’d plumbed three years earlier, and squeals of mock horror, the nightly Crossroads silliness, a sophomore boy prancing in his BVDs and singing “Let Me Entertain You,” an ovation for Darcie Mandell when she took off her sweatshirt, a screaming discovery of a rubber scorpion, cries of dismay at a leak in an air mattress, a posse of ticklers bearing down on Kim Perkins, David Goya pissed off at them. Russ tried to have a private word with Gerri Kohl, but she was embarrassed by her vote and didn’t want to talk about it.

He was an old-school camper, eschewing a sleeping bag, preferring blankets. In dim moonlight, after the flashlights had gone out and the room had quieted, and after the comedy of breaking the silence with a loud random remark had been exhausted, he got up in his long johns and went down the hallway to take a late leak. Among his hundred worries was the bathroom water supply. The tank on the hill above the school was filled by a windmill, and he had no way to gauge if it was full enough to last them for a week in which he had to mix concrete and clean equipment. He’d asked the kids to flush only solid waste, but they were kids and forgot.

Leaving the toilet unflushed, he opened the door and was startled by a figure standing outside it. In her own thermal underwear, her hunting jacket. She backed him into the bathroom and put her arms around him. He could feel her shivering, presumably with cold.

“I made it through the first day,” she whispered.

He clasped her delicate head to his chest, and his testosterone manifested itself in his long johns. A possibility he’d been too obtuse to be aware of on his previous Arizona trip, before Sally Perkins had appeared to him in a dream, a possibility inherent in the nighttime mixing of sexes in close quarters, on the margins of civilization, was now being realized.

“I felt so lonely on the bus,” Frances whispered. “I was wishing I hadn’t come.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t even know what I’m doing here. It only makes sense with you.”

In the intimacy of her you, he detected an invitation to kiss her. But she lowered her arms and turned away.

“Just please include me,” she said. “I need to know you’re there.”

The next morning, after a breakfast heavy on grits, he began work on the handicapped ramps. David Goya did the math on the ramp angles while Russ and Craig Dilkes sorted lumber for the pouring forms and the rest of the crew moved earth. In previous years, when Keith Durochie was involved, Russ had sent crews to nearby ranches. This year, with forty kids penned up at the school, where the only other work was building bookcases, he was at once overstaffed and worried that the ramp-building job was too large to finish in five days. Stripped down to a T-shirt, under a warming sun, he worked with the focus of his mother and his grandfather, and the long morning seemed gone in ten minutes. At lunchtime, he asked Daisy Benally again about Clyde’s grievance with Keith, but Daisy again declined to elaborate. He reproached himself for having been too scattered to get the story from Wanda when he had the chance. Now there was nothing to be done but wait for Wanda to come and explain.

In the evening, when the group was eating dinner and he heard a vehicle on the school road, he briefly hoped it might be Wanda, but he didn’t stop to wonder where the vehicle was going. Not until it came roaring back down the hill did he wonder. Stepping outside, he saw Clyde’s truck turning onto the main road.